# AI Debt Crisis and Inflationary Headwinds

**Podcast:** Prof G Markets
**Published:** 2026-10-15

## Transcript

As soon as autumn rolls around and you swap your iced lattes for pumpkin spice, that's your signal to start thinking about the holidays.
The decor, the gifts, the shopping lists, but more importantly, the holiday treats.
Cheesecakes, cookies, is there anything better?
And when the recipe calls for cream cheese, there's only one option.
Philadelphia, the original cream cheese.
Made with fresh milk and real cream.
This holiday season, whether you're going all out or keeping it simple, make it really Philly good.
Find your favorite holiday recipe at creamcheese.com.
Support for the show comes from Fetch Pet Insurance.
If you have a dog or cat, here's something you need to know.
According to Forbes, one in three pets will need emergency treatment this year.
And every six seconds, a pet parent gets hit with a vet bill over $1,000.
Vet bills don't have to hit that hard.
Fetch is pet insurance that covers accidents, illnesses, and emergency visits and pays back up to 90% of eligible vet bills.
No wonder pet parents give Fetch an excellent rating on Trustpilot.
Get a free quote in minutes at fetchpet.com slash save.
That's fetchpet.com slash save.
Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project.
One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow, none of them talk to each other.
That's where Odo comes in.
An all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together.
From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all-in-one powerful platform.
No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs, and best of all, no spreadsheets.
Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system.
Try for free today at odoo.com slash vox.
That's O-D-O-O dot com slash vox.
Money market matters.
If money is evil, then that building is hell.
The show goes on!
The folks in there are questions so sad!
Welcome to Prof G Markets.
I'm Ed Elson.
It is October 15th.
Let's check in on yesterday's Market Vitals.
The major indices declined on the latest inflation data and continued pain in the chip market.
We will cover both of those topics today.
The yield on 10-year treasuries spiked back above 5.3% following that inflation report.
before retreating by the end of the day.
Bank of America stock fell nearly 5% after the company missed on profits and took a $1.2 billion penalty.
That charge was for a failure to monitor instances of money laundering.
And finally, shares of Bending Spoons soared more than 42%.
on news that Berkshire Hathaway has built a 4% stake in the tech roll-up company.
By the way, I recently interviewed the founder and CEO of Bending Spoon.
You can go check that out.
And one last thing.
Today is the final day for voting in the Signal Award.
So if you like our show, please head to vote.signalaward.com.
Cast your ballots for us in each of these three categories.
Best video podcast, best daily podcast, and best money and finance podcast.
We'll leave a link in the description to make it easy for you.
Thank you so much.
Okay, what else is happening?
AI cloud company CoreWeave might be on its lost legs.
On Tuesday, the yield on one of its bonds touched 15%, reaching a new record high.
Those bonds come due in 2032.
Then the stock tanked on fears that the company wouldn't be able to pay back its massive amounts of debt.
Yesterday, it closed down 16%.
Corweave brought down other AI infrastructure companies as well, including Oracle, Nebius, Broadcom, NVIDIA, TSMC, and Micron, all of which ended the day in the red.
The stakes are quite high for CoreWeave.
As of the end of June, the company had about $52 billion in debt and lease obligations, up from roughly $15 billion a year earlier.
Last quarter, it paid $640 million in interest, more than double what it paid this time last year.
In yesterday's episode, our guest Gil Luria of DA Davidson warned us that if the AI trade falters, CoreWeave's equity could go, quote, to zero.
So.
Is that going to happen?
Here to break this down, we're speaking with Paul Kudrosky, managing partner at SK Ventures.
Paul, great to see you.
Thank you for joining us.
So CoreWeave has been taken to the cleaners today, along with a lot of other heavily debt-laden AI names.
So Nebius is down 11%.
Iron is down 12%.
Oracle is down almost 9%.
or at least that was the closing price.
Let's just start with your general reactions.
What is happening here?
What are the markets telling us?
So the funny thing is, is this has taken so long to happen.
I mean, the situation at Corweave hasn't really changed dramatically from eight months ago.
It's just that it takes people a long time to notice.
And the situation, of course, is that it's among the most indebted of the neoclouds.
And as you pointed out, an incredibly high debt burden.
And that debt burden either has to be refinanced or has to be paid for by selling tokens to people who rent space in the neoclass.
And all of those get more difficult when you have exactly this kind of debt spiral going on.
No different than the U.S.
seeing the 10-year spiking and then all of a sudden that has an effect on the deficit.
As people look forward with the increasing cost of Corweave's debt, as the spreads blow out, they look forward and say, wait a minute, that has implications for the refinancing and future raises.
And so as a result, that becomes the same sort of debt-death spiral that you've seen in some sovereigns.
And it's just playing out.
It took a long time to play out inside of Corweave, but it's finally happening.
And there's a whole bunch of reasons why.
probably among the largest is that in the same way that fundraising among the AI CapEx fundraising has squeezed sort of the mid-duration treasuries, the 10 years, for example, which is incredible and has never really happened before, the reverse is also true.
that as the 10-year and equivalent duration treasuries become more attractive, it becomes much more difficult for these highly indebted neoclouds to raise money.
So this perverse relationship goes in both directions.
And the net effect is both of them have much more consequential debt burdens and then interest rates going forward.
And the difficulty for a neocloud like Corweave is unlike the United States, it doesn't have a treasury department and can't print money in the basement.
The CEO of Corweave responded to the price move, and he said that the market is acting, quote, irrationally.
He said that the problems at other companies are, quote, bleeding into the narrative around CoreWeave, and that the market, quote, misunderstands the company.
Do you agree with these comments?
No, I mean, these are very typical.
I mean, he has to say these things.
I don't want to imply that there's any kind of, you know.
criminal nefariousness in here, but you have to say these kinds of things to support the company and say that this is not company-specific, this is something broader in the AI marketplace, but it's not.
It's very specific to the most indebted neoclouds because of these twinned phenomena of higher cost of debt, higher cost of debt servicing, so that's at the one end, and at the other end, and Epic AI had a great report about this, about the continuing...
staggering deflation in token prices.
So Epic had a report out, I think it was earlier in the week, pointing out that we've had for the last four years roughly a 13-fold annual decrease in the cost of tokens.
So doing the math, it's pretty straightforward.
It's price times volume, and I got debt that I have to service from that price times volume.
That becomes astronomically more difficult given the increasing volumes required if I'm seeing an annual decline of around 13-fold in terms of the cost.
of tokens, to put it in context, that means you have to grow.
To stand still, you have to grow your token sales, if you will.
Think about it like copper or oil or anything else.
1,300% a year.
That's what 1,300-fold means.
Bringing it back even more, that means you have to double your token sales every 90 days.
This is very tough math, made worse by the blowout in the rates and the increasing cost of servicing the debt.
So these two feed on each other.
So if you've got declining token prices, which essentially means that unless they explode their business, they've got less money coming in.
At the same time, you've got rising yields.
Also, rising yields.
across the board.
I mean, you've got rising yields on— And the rising spreads, too.
It's important to say it's not just the yield, right?
I mean, so the spread over treasuries is blowing out as well.
So there's these two things happening at once, which makes it even more complicated.
Right.
Which I guess the question is, is there a scenario, if spreads remain this high and if yields remain this high, is there a scenario in which Corweave doesn't end up— defaulting?
I mean, I guess that is the question that investors are trying to pulse out right now.
But it does seem that the likelihood that they will not be able to make their interest payments is extremely high.
Do you see a world in which they do figure it out?
No.
I see instead a world where at best you have fairly radical restructuring of their debt obligations, which is what the markets are telling you, right?
When the debt's trading at, say, 80-odd cents on the dollar, when you do the default math, it's saying there's a significant likelihood I will not be repaid in full.
And the reason, generally speaking, why you're not repaid in full is not because of an alien invasion.
It's because the debt gets restructured.
If investors actually thought it was unlikely to be paid at all...
obviously it would be trading at a much lower because we're talking about debt that matures in 2032.
So it's not actually that far away.
So when you see it trading at these levels with the market, the debt market's trying to tell you is this stuff gets restructured.
You're not getting a dollar.
Gartner came out with an analysis.
They estimated that 80% of neoclouds will be out of business by 2030.
And there are a ton of these companies, CoreWeave, Lambda.
Nibius, Iron.
I mean, I could go on all these new names.
Or you can even look at the withdrawn Australian IPO whose name escapes me was Kotubak.
I can't remember who it was.
Yes, Firmus.
But they're another example, right?
So even the public markets are reluctant to receive these guys.
By the way, as an aside with Gartner, there's a great line from Mike Milken from years ago is you only get maximum points for predicting things before it happens.
And so the problem with the Gartner stuff is, OK, yeah, now you're telling me when it's absolutely obvious and these things are distressed.
I'm sorry, I don't put a lot of stake in that.
So yes, they're not wrong.
It's just, it's not particularly helpful to tell you this as the spreads blow out.
Yeah, I guess the question is, it sounds like you believe that this isn't just a core weave problem.
This is a systemic problem.
This is true of, I mean, does it go beyond the neoclouds?
Do you think this is true of Oracle as well?
I mean, NVIDIA was down a little bit, you know, three or 4%.
I mean, their balance sheet, I think, is a lot more healthy than a lot of these companies.
But who do you consider to be in the red zone?
So the Neoclouds across the board and probably Oracle as this kind of, I don't even know, wannabe hyperscaler slash Neocloud has managed to find itself in the gun sights of two different rifles.
So I think that's the group that's most troubled here.
And I think the way to think about it is much like what was happening during the GFC, the global financial crisis, where all of these banks were saying, listen, there's nothing wrong.
Like our debts and we're not defaulting on our debt.
But the market instead was saying here, what you have is a refinancing problem.
We see a wall of refinancing ahead.
And there's a lot of data out here to show that between 28 and 32, there's a massive wall of refinancing.
And it ain't going to happen at the prices that justify your business as it currently looks.
One pushback that I've heard is CoreWeave has this NVIDIA relationship.
NVIDIA invested more than $2 billion in the company.
They own around 10% of the company.
They have committed to buy billions of dollars worth of compute.
Perhaps there's a world in which NVIDIA bails them out, or NVIDIA saves them, or they make sure that CoreWeave and any of their other little neocloud startups that they have backed, make sure that none of them will fail.
Is that something that is, you know?
Is that a reasonable prediction?
Do you think that could actually happen?
No, I don't think so.
I think this is like this classic speculative game the market likes to play.
It's the old sort of like, if my aunt had wheels, should be a bicycle problem.
Absolutely.
If I grant you that, then everything else follows.
But I have to grant you something wildly implausible in the first place, which that NVIDIA sees the need to own and restructure a neocloud.
And it's really difficult to see why they would do that.
Wouldn't the problem be that it could, if CoreWeave, goes, you know, goes out of business, if CoreWeave has to default on its debt.
Is there not a situation where investors' confidence in the entire AI trade will be completely shaken on that this could be sort of the beginning of the end and the house of cards starts to fall?
I mean, might it be in NVIDIA's best interest to take their billions of dollars in cash and just say, OK, we'll make sure that you stay propped up, keep you afloat so that we all stay afloat?
The problem is the scale of the obligations once the dominoes start falling.
So once it starts here, how far do you go with this?
It wouldn't surprise me to see someone try to...
staunch the bleeding as the first neocloud fails.
But the problem is then, of course, the cascade will continue because the market will test your commitment to the trade, as it were.
And as a result, how many of these people, how many of these companies are you willing to backstop in an effort to make sure that you don't have this rippling cascade?
And suddenly you say to yourself as NVIDIA or someone else, hang on a second, I'm not Hank Paulson.
I'm not the Federal Reserve.
I'm not in the business of bailing out the system.
The system goes down without me.
So my understanding is you believe that we are going to see a pretty significant correction.
How close, in your mind, are we to that point, given what we saw with Corey?
Timing is always impossible.
I mean, I've been saying sometime between now and the first second quarter of next year, but...
I saw Paul Tudor Jones on CNBC yesterday saying sort of something similar.
You know, so he's much smarter than I am.
So I'll go with Paul and say the first half of the year.
But I think it could be sooner.
The thing is, is that one way to think about what's going on, and I get this question all the time, it's like the timing question.
And they say, well, it can't be soon because market price earnings multiples are nothing like they were back in the dot-com era.
Where's the bubble, Paul?
Where's the bubble?
And of course, the answer is the valuation of open ion anthropic alone.
combined in the private markets and what we're likely to see as they come public is already more than the peak Nasdaq valuation when it crashed in 2000.
So the problem is, is people are looking in public markets for a thing that's sitting in plain sight in private ones.
And so we're already there and the triggers are everywhere.
But it's your view then that...
The bubble exists, but it's not pervasive to the entire market.
It's in pockets of the market.
It's in places like private markets or the neoclouds or certain chip manufacturers.
There are some stocks which are way over their skills.
Yes.
I mean, it's widespread.
It's just that...
Private markets are the new public markets, right?
That's the term we've been hearing now for five years because of the disappearance of public equities from the marketplace.
And so as a result, unsurprisingly, if private markets are the new public markets, private markets are where the problem is.
And the only exception to that rule broadly is China, where something now, there's something like 880 AI lists or public companies that are AI related now up from zero two years ago with a combined market cap of something like three trillion.
So they're well on their way to creating on the public side.
So we have the private side.
happening here because we've decided that privates are the new public and the public side happening in China.
And those two are rippling and going to like waves coinciding.
Whenever they go down, they'll bring each other down.
And so that's, say, $6 trillion in nonsensical market capitalization.
As we record this, Anthropic is just wrapping up its private investor day.
They're reportedly disclosing some of their financials to the pre-IPO investors.
Supposedly, some of those financials might come out.
Soon, we haven't seen them.
Maybe they'll be out by the time this episode ends.
And by out, you mean that some investment banker will leak it.
This is the thing, right?
I mean, people, they leak.
It's so hilarious.
People act like they found a copy at a hotel lobby.
No, it's an investment banker who says, hey, by the way, here's this.
Call it a leak.
No, it's just pre-marketing the IPO, which is illegal, of course, but bankers do it anyway.
So anyways, I digress.
But that's what's really happening here.
I assume that whatever numbers we see, you don't think will be particularly informative as to what is actually going on in terms of their financials?
There are only two numbers I really care about.
And one is the level of customer concentration, because we have a pretty strong sense that more than 80% of the revenues are perhaps eight companies.
And I want to see the customer concentration, because if that's so, that's unprecedented.
And in particular, I want to see what's happening with respect to the coding aspect of that, because my hunch is, and we've seen this in recent data, that we're really at the other end of this coding frenzy that drove the initial adoption.
And so everything now has to happen from other marketplaces that look nothing like coding.
So those two things are all I care about.
And I doubt they'll give us much color on those, and the rest will be just earnings before bad things.
Paul Gajoski is managing partner at SK Ventures.
Paul, always appreciate it.
Thank you.
Sure.
After the break, the latest inflation data.
And be sure to tune in tomorrow, October 16th, for a live stream with our very own research associate, Dan Shallon.
He's going to be breaking down the winners and losers of the autonomous vehicle wars.
You can subscribe to access that conversation and many others at profgmedia.com slash subscribe.
Support for the show comes from AG1.
Just when you might have settled into your post-summer routine, October comes to shake things up a little more.
The light changes, the days get shorter, and sometimes those good habits you built up can slip.
So, if your diet has gotten a little off track, AG1 makes it easy to add some consistency back into your morning.
Just mix one scoop with cold water every morning before anything else.
One scoop and eight ounces of cold water in the morning can help you maintain energy, support gut health, and immune system all day long.
And the next-gen formula delivers more than 75 ingredients clinically shown to support gut health, fill common nutrient gaps, and improve key nutrient levels within three months.
I've been drinking AG1.
I travel with their sticks.
I find it's a really easy, convenient way to try and maintain some decent kind of nutrition hygiene.
I love these little sticks.
I find them very convenient.
AG1 can help you keep one thing consistent, high-quality nutritional support every single day, no matter where you start your morning.
Go to drinkag1.com slash markets for a limited time.
Get a free immune support bundle, including a bottle of omega-3 fish oil and a bottle of vitamin D3K2 with your first subscription order of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro.
That's drinkag1.com slash markets.
Support for the show comes from BCX, the public ticker for private tech.
For generations, American companies have moved the world forward through their ingenuity and determination.
And for generations, everyday Americans could be a part of that journey through perhaps the greatest innovation of all, the U.S.
stock market.
It didn't matter whether you were a factory worker in Detroit or a farmer in Omaha.
Anyone could own a piece of the great American companies.
But now that's changed.
Today, our most innovative companies are staying private rather than going public.
The result is that everyday Americans are excluded from investing and getting left further behind while a select few reap all the benefits.
Until now.
Introducing VCX, the public ticker for private tech, now available wherever you buy stocks.
VCX by Fundrise gives everyone the opportunity to invest in the next generation of innovation, including the companies leading the AI revolution, space exploration, defense tech, and more.
Visit GetVCX.com for more info.
That's GetVCX.com.
Carefully consider the investment material before investing, including objectives, risks, charges, and expenses.
This and other information can be found in the fund's prospectus at GetVCX.com.
This is a paid sponsorship.
Support for today's episode comes from Delta, official airline of the National Women's Soccer League.
Traveling is basically magic.
It creates opportunities, it fosters understanding, it expands horizons, it connects people and communities to each other and to their own potential.
Those are the values that drive Delta.
With up to 5,500 daily Delta and Delta Connection flights to more than 300 destinations on six continents, Delta is committed to helping you explore your world.
Whatever gives you the travel bug, Delta is here to help you get there.
Visit Delta.com for more info.
Delta, wherever the journey takes you.
We're back with ProfG Markets.
Prices rose 3.7% in September from a year earlier, the highest rate since May.
The bulk of the increase in prices came from energy.
Gas prices rose 9.1% for the month and are up 34% for the past year.
However, core prices, which exclude food and energy, rose by 0.3% month over month, which was also hotter than expected.
Meanwhile, September marked the sixth straight month of declines in Americans' real earnings.
Average hourly earnings adjusted for inflation are down 0.7% from a year earlier.
Stocks fell and the yield on the 10-year Treasury rose after this inflation report was released.
So joining us to discuss this inflation report and the state of inflation in the U.S.
today, we are speaking with Mark Zandi, Chief Economist at Moody's Analytics.
Mark.
Pretty bad report.
3.7 percent, an increase from the previous month, higher than expected, real wages down again.
What do you make of this?
Yeah, not good, Ed.
I mean, inflation is uncomfortably high.
And, you know, the Iran war's fingerprints are all over it.
Obviously, the higher energy fuel costs go directly to the war.
And there's a lot of pass-through going on.
into the rest of the economy and adding to the inflationary pressures.
Tariffs don't help, and immigration policy also are an issue.
But that war is really juicing up inflation and causing a lot of problems.
And as you say, inflation is now consistently above the rate of wage growth.
So people's purchasing power, it's now declining.
And it obviously goes to the angst that many Americans feel at this point.
I just saw this statistic, which I just found fascinating, which is that since Trump, took office again since he returned to the White House, in real terms, American wage growth, the average American wage growth, is zero.
Which is just quite fascinating considering that the economy's strong, earnings are exploding up around 40% since he took office.
I mean, is that just evidence, more evidence of a K-shape taking effect?
Yeah, it is the case-shaped economy.
I mean, but this is not a surprise, right?
We go back, roll back the clock to right before the tariffs in April of 2025.
The tariffs were coming and, you know, economists said, like me and almost everybody else, that tariffs are going to lead to slower growth and higher inflation.
Then the immigration policy, same deal, slower growth, higher inflation.
And of course, the wars, that's pretty obvious, slower growth, higher inflation.
You know, it's not surprising that, you know, we are where we are, you know, given inflation and now it's undermining rural wages.
And to your point about the strong economy, it's OK, but it can't be that strong.
Right.
I mean, if nominal wage growth that's, you know, with inflation considered is decelerating, that means that the labor market is on the soft side.
We're not operating in full employment.
you know, we're 4.2% in employment rate.
So, you know, I'll take it.
But, you know, at the end of the day, we're still not at full employment.
Yeah, I guess it just depends on what your definition of the economy actually is.
And we keep on hearing different bragging points.
I mean, usually it's that stocks have risen or that GDP is going up.
But as you say, I mean, this, when you look at a lot of other things, it's not looking great.
One thing that I have been hearing is that consumer spending is going up and therefore that is a sign that, you know, the American consumer is strong.
What do you make of the consumer spending statistics and what does it tell us about the overall health of American households right now?
Well, they're OK, too.
And this goes back to the case shape, right?
I mean, the consumer that's driving the train is the well-to-do, the folks that own the stocks, right?
I mean, AI stock prices is going, stock market is going straight north, or at least it has been.
It all goes back to AI, artificial intelligence and AI stocks.
Since chat, GPT was pulling on the planet four years ago.
They've gone straight up.
I mean, total shareholder wealth.
If you take all the stock wealth outstanding, it's doubled in four years from $35 trillion to $70 trillion.
That makes a lot of people feel pretty good about spending.
And those folks that own the stocks, they're out spending and driving the train.
Everybody else, and that's probably two-thirds of Americans that don't own much of any stock, or many don't even own their own home.
They're hanging in there, but it's by their fingertips.
And of course, I don't know how much longer they can hang on when their real purchasing power is declining and their saving rates are now about as low as they can go.
So it feels like the consumer is going to show a bit of a bend here, particularly if the stock market doesn't continue to move north.
You did a calculation of the costs of the war for American households specifically.
Could you take us through that calculation?
How expensive has the Iran war been for the average American?
Yeah, well, the headline is, and I put out a social media post because we just hit $2,000 in extra costs related to the war.
And that breaks down into three, broadly three things.
One is obviously the higher cost of energy, gasoline, fuel, diesel prices, jet fuel, home heating, that kind of thing.
That's the bulk of the higher cost.
Then there's the cost of higher interest rates, right?
Because, you know, the Fed's been pushing on the brakes to slow things down because of the high inflation.
We're going back to the war.
And take the 10-year treasury yield, you know, the day before the war started in late February, we're sitting at a 10-year yield that was below 4%.
Now we're sitting with a yield of 5.25%.
So a lot of that goes back to the war.
So you account for all that.
And then the third is the military cost, because ultimately, at the end of the day, That's a cost that's going to be borne by you and I and taxpayers and the American people through, you know, however we address it.
And I took the Pentagon instruments for that.
So, you know, there's a lot of other costs involved.
You know, everything like, you know, fertilizer costs are up, which is going to affect crop prices and groceries down the road.
Helium prices, which affect the cost of semiconductors and thus the price of the consumer electronics that we buy.
I think.
I couldn't account for that.
They're too hard to account for.
So in my view, that $2,000 estimate is a conservative estimate.
Conservative.
So $2,000 per household.
And that's basically in like the most direct costs that we can think of when it comes to the war having an immediate impact, as you say, on oil prices, also interest rates.
The mortgage rates are now skyrocketing again.
Where does this leave the Federal Reserve?
Because as you say, Their mandate has been, we're going to raise, or the last decision was to raise rates.
But at the same time, that can also be a problem if you're trying to pay down a mortgage and your rates are rising as a result of higher rates and therefore higher yields.
I mean, where does this leave the Fed?
What are they supposed to do at this point?
Well, it sounds like they're going to raise rates more.
I mean, they increased rates back in September.
You know, there was another meeting in a couple of weeks.
And markets are now putting a kind of close to 50-50 chance that they raise rates in October.
But if not, certainly by December.
And then markets are anticipating two or three more rate cuts, excuse me, rate increases next year.
So if you listen to all the conversation coming from the Fed and what they're saying, take a look at the minutes from the last meeting and try to divide kind of where they are based on all this communication, what communication we are receiving, does feel like they're ready to step on the brakes again.
And there's the thinking, the kind of the consensus view seemingly is that, you know, they don't want this inflation, which is due to the war, to become more entrenched and much more difficult to ultimately bring out.
So they're kind of trying to head off that possibility at the pass before that actually happens.
I mean, In my own view, I'd be more focused and at least put more weight on what's going on in the labor market going back to full employment.
And I don't quite understand how raising rates is going to solve the problems of inflation created by the Iran war.
That's not going to be solved by higher rates.
So I probably would be a dissenter, but it's a committee with lots of views.
And those views hold that the Fed's going to continue to raise rates as long as inflation remains a problem.
Something that we were thinking about just our research team offline.
I mean, the last time that we had what people generally agreed was a very difficult economy was probably 2022 when you had extremely high inflation coming out of COVID.
I mean, that was the last time where I feel like a lot of people kind of agreed like this is a very difficult time to be an American consumer.
But it seems like we're now.
coming close to that.
And I wonder if how this moment in 2026, given what we're seeing in inflation, but also significantly lower job openings in that period of time, like, how does this compare compared to like the past five or so years?
Where is our economy when you look at recent history?
Well, it feels very vulnerable to me.
Again, I mean, the kind of top line numbers, you look at GDP growth, you look at the unemployment rate, you say, OK, you know, the stock market has been rocketing higher.
You know, you look at those things, you say it feels OK.
But, you know, just despite that, it feels highly vulnerable and very fragile, I think would be the right word.
I mean, how can it be?
How can you consider the economy healthy when people's real purchasing power is actually declining?
And it just that does or how can it be that you feel good about the economy if no one's hiring?
So no one's lying off.
That's great, because if it did, we'd be in recession.
But if you don't lose your job, because if you lose your job, it's going to be very difficult to get back into the labor market.
And of course, we all focus on the equity market.
But for most Americans, it's about their home.
And house prices haven't gone anywhere for three to four years, maybe not even longer than that.
I don't know.
I mean, we should be able to navigate through if we could just get out of our own way.
But, you know, it feels like there's a lot of risk there and we're quite vulnerable because the economy is very fragile.
All right.
Mark Zandi is chief economist at Moody's Analytics.
Mark, always appreciate your time.
Thanks, Ed.
Another day, another corruption scandal in Washington, this time involving the U.S.
derivatives regulator.
According to a new report from Bloomberg, investigators at the CFTC were ordered to retract their analysis of potential insider trading that was related to the president.
Their investigation came after billions of dollars' worth of oil trades were executed right before Trump announced that he would be pulling back on missile strikes on Iran.
Those trades were so unusually successful as to be quite suspicious.
which is why the CFTC then did its job of finding out if the traders knew something that the rest of us didn't.
But right in the middle of that investigation, a senior advisor at the agency told them to stop.
He said, retract the referral, throw it away.
And that was an order that has supposedly never been given at the CFTC before.
In other words, someone higher up told these guys, don't touch this.
I wonder why.
The craziest part, though.
is that this isn't the first time that this has happened in this administration.
Over at the SEC recently, another investigator was told to stop looking into the Trump family.
Her name is Margaret Ryan.
And by the way, right after she was prohibited from pursuing an investigation, she mysteriously left the SEC.
Over at the DOJ, a similar event occurred.
Gail Slater tried to investigate a merger that had compromising relationships with the Trump administration.
She was immediately overruled.
Her deputies were fired.
And soon enough, she was mysteriously ousted as well.
So not only do we have a scandal today that rivals Watergate in terms of the scale and the scope of the corruption and the attempt to cover it up, we don't just have that scandal.
We have three of them.
And each of them tells the exact same story.
Blatant signs of corruption by the president, followed by an attempt to investigate it, followed by the investigation getting shut down, and in some cases, people getting fired.
So what more evidence of corruption do we actually need?
Now, this story should be front page news, but unfortunately, it isn't, because the world is focused on Iran and AI and the midterms, you name it.
But I said it yesterday, and I will say it again today.
We are not going to stop talking about this.
It is too egregious, too corrupt, and I'm sick of pretending that any of this is normal.
This is the most corrupt administration in the history of America.
And the only thing that will make things right is to start putting people in jumpsuits.
Why?
Because that is how we punish criminals.
And if we think...
that we live in a fair society, if we think that we still live in the same America that existed decades ago, well, then we cannot keep making exceptions.
Okay, that's it for today.
This episode was produced by Claire Miller and Alison Weiss and engineered by Benjamin Spencer.
Our video editor is Brad Williams.
Our research team is Dan Chalon, Kristen O'Donoghue, and Mia Silverio.
And our social producer is Jake McPherson.
Thank you for listening to Prof G Markets from Prof G Media.
If you liked what you heard, give us a follow.
I'm Ed Elson.
Tune in tomorrow for our conversation with Liakit Ahmed.
Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project.
One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow none of them talk to each other.
That's where Odo comes in, an all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together.
From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all-in-one powerful platform.
No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs, and best of all, no spreadsheets.
Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system.
Try for free today at odoo.com slash vox.
That's odoo.com slash vox.
Support for the show comes from Jira by Atlassian.
Your work lives in scattered places, and it's not only your team searching for context, your AI agents need it too.
Jira taps Atlassian's teamwork graph to bring that context together across Jira, Confluence, Slack, GitHub, and more.
and makes it easy to share with the agents you already use, like Claude, Purser, and GitHub Copilot.
Assign them work directly or connect your agents through MCP.
Spend less time hunting for context.
Less time asking, wait, what did we decide?
And more time actually shipping with Jira.
Learn more at jira.com.
That's J-I-R-A dot com.
Dir ist wichtig, was auf deinem Teller landet?
Rewe.
Dein Markt.