Sticker shock has become the new normal. The tariff shuffle keeps businesses guessing — and households paying. The country’s costs to service the debt alone is more than a trillion dollars a year. And the Fed — the much-maligned institution supposedly steering this ship — is backed into a corner. Cut rates, and risk fueling more inflation. Hold steady, and watch jobs disappear as well as watch the federal government debt service costs rise.
This week the Collapse Life podcast welcomes back Peter C. Earle, an economist from the American Institute for Economic Research, to make sense of it all. Unlike the usual talking heads, Earle doesn’t spin tales of sudden collapse. His warning is subtler — and maybe scarier. The real danger is the slow squeeze.
Topics covered include:
How tariffs are reshaping business decisions before they even fully hit
Why the jobs numbers can’t be trusted — and what firing the BLS commissioner really means
Inflation’s “cooling” myth, and why it feels worse at the checkout line
The dollar’s long decline — not overnight collapse, but a slow erosion of trust
What emerges is a picture of an economy drifting into dysfunction. If you want to start to understand what you’re feeling in grocery aisles, at the gas pump, and in your mortgage rate, don’t miss this conversation.
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