The Economy the President Doesn’t Mention
In an interview with The New York Post’s “Pod Force One,” President Trump downplayed the domestic financial impact of the ongoing conflict with Iran, describing the U.S. economy as “unbelievable,” saying it was “in good shape,” and noting that it had been “beating records.” He acknowledged higher prices but largely attributed them to the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, casting it as the main driver of recent economic strain rather than deeper structural problems, and said he expected the situation to be temporary, remarking that he thought it would “resolve itself fairly quickly.”1
I looked back at Stack the Week from last week. Here are the items from just last week related to the economy.2 See if that’s consistent with such a claim:
Gas prices fall hardest on those who can least dodge them. Since the Iran war began driving up energy prices, commuting fuel now eats about 4 percent of income for households earning $40,000 or less, up from 3 percent a year ago. For households above $100,000, it stays under 1 percent. The New York Fed found that after the Strait of Hormuz closure, families under $40,000 cut gasoline use by about 7 percent while higher earners barely changed. Cutting gas isn’t like cutting back on luxuries. It means a skipped doctor’s appointment, a delayed errand, a missed Sunday at church.
The savings cushion is thinning. The personal saving rate fell to 2.6 percent in April, down from 4.3 percent at the start of the year—the lowest since June 2022. Roughly half of April’s spending increase went to necessities: gas, utilities, housing, food.
Growth is meh. A revision to first-quarter growth from 2.0 percent to 1.6 percent after the Commerce Department found spending and investment weaker than first reported. The administration had predicted quarters of 5 percent growth. That quarter mostly predates the war.
More households are going hungry in a country that isn’t in recession. Food insecurity reached 13.7 percent of American households, up from 10.2 percent in 2021. Among families with children, 18.4 percent—nearly one in five, the highest since the years around the Great Recession. Unemployment is low. Growth continues. The disconnect is the point: when rent, groceries, and utilities rise, lower-income families have nothing left to cut. A wealthier family postpones a vacation. A poorer one is already spending almost everything on the basics, and once savings and credit run out, a single car repair becomes a crisis.
The people paid to be optimistic are getting nervous. CEO confidence fell 12 points in the second quarter to 47, back in negative territory. Nearly half of chief executives now say conditions are worse than six months ago—up from 8 percent the previous quarter. The reversal matters because it followed the burst of optimism that greeted the President’s return. They’re the people who decide whether to build the factory and hire the workers.
The gains are going somewhere—just not to wages. Typical CEO compensation rose nearly 6 percent in 2025, to $17.7 million. The median employee earned $89,744. At the median company surveyed, it now takes a worker 200 years to earn what the chief executive earns in one. A year ago the figure was 192. Productivity is up; the share of it going to wages is near a historic low.
Teen summer hiring is on track for its worst season since 1948. Inflation and fuel costs are squeezing the small businesses that traditionally hire young workers; resorts and amusement parks are cutting seasonal jobs. More than half of American teenagers worked in the 1970s and 1980s. Today about 35 percent do.
And fun is the first thing to go. Forty-eight percent of Americans said they aren’t having enough fun. Twelve percent couldn’t remember their last entirely free day. You might wonder why that’s included in a list of economic findings, but set it beside the food-insecurity numbers and the shrinking savings rate and it takes on a different flavor.
There is little hard evidence that the situation— like Covid-19 before it— is likely to “resolve itself fairly quickly,” and quite a bit of evidence pointing the other way.
( For a broader view of the economy, the Economic Dashboard has some figures (that your correspondents needs to update) but which give a sense of things.