# Where's My Golden Age?

An episode of [Paul Krugman Podcast](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1877144831), 6 Mar 2026, 4:54.

Audio: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/190108987/f13aca51bd13d7a2267f939ce2aa47e3.mp3

A brief reflection on a bad morning for jobs and a bad week for energy. Get full access to Paul Krugman at paulkrugman.substack.com/subscribe

## Transcript

[0:01] SPEAKER_00: It's Friday, March 6th.
[0:03] SPEAKER_00: Do you know where your golden age is?
[0:06] SPEAKER_00: Hi, Paul Krugman here.
[0:08] SPEAKER_00: It is Friday, March 6th.
[0:10] It's 17 days since the State of the Union address in which
[0:14] Donald Trump basically
[0:16] tried to allay concerns about affordability and all of that by
[0:19] insisting that
[0:20] SPEAKER_00: everything is great.
[0:21] Talked about a golden age,
[0:23] about fantastic job growth like nothing you've ever seen.
[0:27] Boasted about low gasoline prices,
[0:29] which he said were below 230 a gallon in most states.
[0:33] SPEAKER_00: None of that was true.
[0:35] SPEAKER_00: I don't think there was a single actually true number in the speech.
[0:39] SPEAKER_00: But the general position was, you know, things are doing great.
[0:43] SPEAKER_00: Doesn't look that way this morning.
[0:46] SPEAKER_00: Number that got everybody in my alley's attention was the jobs report,
[0:51] SPEAKER_00: which said that the US actually lost 92,000 jobs in February.
[0:55] SPEAKER_00: Now, that's a very noisy number.
[0:57] SPEAKER_00: I don't actually believe that.
[0:59] I don't believe that the US economy gained 126,000 in January
[1:02] and then lost 92,000 in February.
[1:05] SPEAKER_00: Probably,
[1:06] SPEAKER_00: taking all the various numbers together,
[1:08] SPEAKER_00: the real story is that employment growth has more or less flatlined.
[1:12] That's basically since Trump took office,
[1:15] definitely since Liberation Day in April.
[1:18] That is not having as much consequence in terms of rising
[1:22] unemployment as it might,
[1:23] SPEAKER_00: because we've also shut off the supply of labor through immigration,
[1:28] SPEAKER_00: through basically pogroms against immigrants.
[1:32] SPEAKER_00: But it's not great.
[1:34] It's certainly not this wonderful,
[1:36] booming economy that Trump wants us to believe we have.
[1:40] SPEAKER_00: The other thing that is really noticeable,
[1:46] and that has been happening over the past week since we started
[1:49] bombing Iran,
[1:50] SPEAKER_00: is what's happening to oil prices and gasoline prices.
[1:56] SPEAKER_00: Oil,
[1:56] SPEAKER_00: last I looked,
[1:57] SPEAKER_00: a little while before recording this,
[2:00] SPEAKER_00: the price of Brent crude,
[2:01] SPEAKER_00: which is kind of the global standard,
[2:03] SPEAKER_00: usually a few dollars more than the price of West Texas Intermediate,
[2:07] SPEAKER_00: just cracked $90 a barrel.
[2:09] SPEAKER_00: That's a significant rise.
[2:11] SPEAKER_00: What is really striking to me,
[2:13] SPEAKER_00: and it's happening faster than I thought it would,
[2:16] SPEAKER_00: is prices at the pump.
[2:17] SPEAKER_00: So back 17 days ago,
[2:19] SPEAKER_00: when Trump was boasting about low gas prices,
[2:22] SPEAKER_00: the national average was actually $2.98 a gallon.
[2:23] SPEAKER_00: It's now, or as of yesterday, it was $3.32 a gallon.
[2:25] SPEAKER_00: So that's a pretty big increase.
[2:27] SPEAKER_00: It's still a bit short of what you expect
[2:36] what we would expect to eventually happen,
[2:37] given what's happening to crude prices.
[2:40] SPEAKER_00: But there's probably, I'm about to say, more in the pipeline.
[2:43] SPEAKER_00: I guess that's kind of literally true,
[2:45] although it's more still in the oil tankers that are stuck on
[2:48] the wrong side of the
[2:49] SPEAKER_00: Strait of Hormuz.
[2:50] SPEAKER_00: But in any case, that's a pretty major hit.
[2:56] Gas prices are not anywhere near their high point during the
[2:59] supply chain crisis after...
[3:02] SPEAKER_00: after the economy recovered from COVID.
[3:05] They're certainly not anywhere near in real terms where they
[3:07] were in the worst of
[3:09] SPEAKER_00: the oil crises of past decades,
[3:11] SPEAKER_00: but they are up.
[3:14] SPEAKER_00: And the thing about that,
[3:21] SPEAKER_00: Normally,
[3:21] it's a really bad idea for presidents to boast about gasoline
[3:25] prices because they
[3:26] SPEAKER_00: have very little impact on gasoline prices ordinarily.
[3:29] SPEAKER_00: There's not much a president can do to bring gasoline prices down.
[3:33] SPEAKER_00: Ordinarily, there's not much he can do to push them up either.
[3:37] SPEAKER_00: The high gas prices of five years ago were not...
[3:42] SPEAKER_00: something that Joe Biden did.
[3:44] They were a world economy recovering without sufficient
[3:47] logistics capacity to deal
[3:49] SPEAKER_00: with the sudden increase in demand.
[3:51] SPEAKER_00: So ordinarily, presidents can't do much in either direction.
[3:54] However,
[3:55] one way to drive gasoline prices up is to start a war that
[3:59] leads to
[4:00] closing the Strait of Hormuz and basically lopping off 20% of
[4:05] the world's oil
[4:06] SPEAKER_00: supply,
[4:06] SPEAKER_00: which is what has just happened.
[4:10] Presumably Trump was at least contemplating a war on Iran when
[4:14] he gave the State of
[4:14] SPEAKER_00: the Union address.
[4:15] SPEAKER_00: So why there wasn't some
[4:17] forethought to you know what is this war going to do to
[4:20] gasoline prices i don't
[4:22] know except that they really as far as you can tell they're in
[4:25] denial i just saw
[4:27] some interview uh footage in which trump said oh you know was
[4:30] told gas prices are
[4:32] up a lot he said no they aren't so maybe it's just not a denial
[4:36] in advance and
[4:36] SPEAKER_00: maybe even denial right now but anyway uh you know it's
[4:42] This whole attempt to convince people that things are great is
[4:47] developing not
[4:49] SPEAKER_00: necessarily to Trump's advantage.
[4:51] SPEAKER_00: Enough for today.

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