Let’s do a fact check on the administration’s claim.
Real Income in Billions Fact Check
- Real Personal Income peaked at 20,671 in September 2025
- Real PI Excluding Transfers peaked at 16,721 in in September 2025
- Real Disposable Personal Income DPI peaked at 18,133 in April 2025
Those statements ignore the massive Covid free money stimulus checks.
Disposable Personal Income is after taxes.
Transfer payments are government distributions for which no current services have been performed.
Examples include Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP (food stamps), disability payments, etc.
The NBER, the official arbiter of recessions, tracks Real PI Excluding Transfers.
Economic Director Statements
Please note White House economic director downplays Americans’ economic anxiety amid high gas prices and inflation
National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett painted a rosy picture of the economy Sunday, downplaying Americans’ growing pessimism about the economy amid high gas prices and rising inflation as the Iran war goes on.
“Look at what’s happening to real wages,” Hassett told ABC News’ “This Week” co-anchor Jonathan Karl, claiming “really positive news” about the economy was being ignored. “On balance, real incomes, real wages are going up.”
“But are you saying Americans are not hurting?” Karl asked. “Just talking to people, I mean, people seem anxious and uneasy about the economy, don’t they?”
Hassett replied, “Well, look, in the end, people look at their wallets and they decide how to vote, and if they look at their wallets and look at how much money they have after the increase in prices, they’re going to find that they have a lot more money.”
Karl asked Hassett about a comment from Exxon Mobil Senior Vice President Neil Chapman, who warned that oil inventory is “really low” and that oil prices could shoot up in a matter of weeks. Hassett dismissed Chapman’s assessment, insisting that there is enough inventory.
“We track inventories every day. We started out with billions, billions of barrels of private and government inventories, and we still are in the billions, and so there’s plenty of runway,” Hassett said.
Real Personal Income and Real DPI Percent Change From Year Ago
Real PI and Real DPI Percent Change
- Real Personal Income: -1.1 Percent
- Real PI Excluding Transfers: -1.04 Percent
- Real Disposable Personal Income: -1.18 Percent
That sorry chart reflects how Trump has addressed the affordability problem this term.
Moreover, those numbers do not include property taxes, homeowners’ insurance, or the price of a house if you want to buy one.
Lying Is a Requirement
Hassett is an economic idiot, a liar, or both.
To work for the administration, being a liar is a requirement.
I let the reader decide if he is an economic idiot.
Hassett on Credit Card Debt
Bream: The Journal says the percentage of delinquent credit card balances is 13%, the highest since the period following the financial crisis. People say they’re using them for necessities. Your message to them?
Hassett: We talk to the CEOs of the credit card companies all the time. Delinquency is different from default, and there’s not any financial threat to the credit card companies. It’s just people are taking a little bit longer.
Skyline: What makes this clip so politically damaging is that he wasn’t trapped into saying something outrageous. His first instinct was to reassure viewers that the credit card companies were doing fine.
Related Posts
May 26, 2026: Consumer Credit Stress Is Comparable to the Great Recession
Auto delinquencies are at a new record and credit cards are near record high.
May 28, 2026: Inflation Expectations Surge in Two Distinct Consumer Confidence Surveys
57% of consumers say high prices are eroding their personal finances.
May 28, 2026: PCE Inflation Spikes Again, Year-Over-Year Highest Since May 2023
Year-over-year PCE inflation jumped to 3.8 percent. The Fed wants 2.0 percent.
“We track inventories every day. We started out with billions, billions of barrels of private and government inventories, and we still are in the billions, and so there’s plenty of runway,” Hassett said.
Hassett is not stupid. His job is to spin things to make them sound better than they are. It is true that there were 8.4 billion barrels of oil and refined products counted in storage when the war began. Today that has dropped below 8 billion barrels, so he is technically correct when he says that there are billions of barrels still there.
What he doesn’t tell you is that 7.6 billion barrels of that total is “operational” and completely unavailable for use. What is actually useable was about 800 million barrels and that is now down to a few hundred million barrels and much of it will run out by July. (I did a post on this recently).
Today:
DOW: -minus 457
NASDAQ – minus 257
US 10 Yr – 4.495 ie plus 0.04
Chorus
But don’t tell my heart, my achy breaky heart
I just don’t think he’d understand
And if you tell my heart, my achy breaky heart
He might blow up and kill this man
test
I’ve had a perfect score every time they made me take the test…
Interesting interview with Micheal Green from Simplify Asset Management regarding his take on inflation and the 30y Treasury bond yield at 5%. I think it was on Adam Taggert. He believes that current inflation data given by the economic politburo are Oversstating inflation and that the 30year yield is a rare bargain yielding a positive inflation adjusted return. He claims that people are unduly distrustful of govt figures and compared them to the flat earthers. Cites a few examples of unbiased inflation reporting firms like Truflation. He is a smart guy but I don’t buy it one bit. Even went so far as stating that although he does have an asset management firm you could do as well by just buying the bonds. I give him credit for saying that but something is amiss here that I don’t see. If true, income figures may be outpacing true inflation. Again not in my book. Although I do not see where he has anything to gain by saying this. His opinion was the market being in bubble terrirory this is a conservative safe play.
Trump signs new order to shut down bank accounts
https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/policy/articles/trump-signs-order-shut-down-225333740.html
Isn’t this exactly the same play book the Biden Admin used in 23-24? Pointed to some stats that claimed the economy was great? I posit that anyone that thinks stats will move the voters is living in a fantasy world. Hasset was right on one point, voters look to their wallets. But, he was wrong on the conclusion they have come (are coming) to.
Hmm.
1. Apparently the stats moved voters in the last election
2. But they won’t this election
and
3. Someone can’t think
I recall this was a regular thing under Biden, too. It seems that if you get too high in the government, you are apt to be insulated from the real world. That’s dangerous.
A truly thugged out gangsta comment. I wish I could take credit for it:
Shanaka Anslem Perera https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/svg/26a1.svg
@shanaka86
Oil spiked as much as eight percent, then started giving it back within hours.
Not one barrel of supply changed in between.
What moved the price was two sentences, and that is the entire story.
The first sentence came from Tehran: Iran was suspending talks with Washington and preparing to fully close the Strait of Hormuz. Crude leapt. The second came from Trump hours later, that the talks were back on at a rapid pace. Crude faded off its highs. The strait itself never moved. It was shut before both sentences and it is shut after them.
You are no longer watching an oil market. You are watching a market that trades the odds of a peace deal and prints the answer on an oil ticker.
The reason is mechanical. The strait has been effectively shut for months, running at a few percent of its normal traffic. There is almost no supply left to lose through it, so the price has stopped reacting to supply. It reacts to one variable now, the probability that a deal reopens what is already closed. Oil has quietly become a derivative of a negotiation.
And the calm between the spikes is manufactured. To hold the price down while the strait stays shut, Washington has drawn its Strategic Petroleum Reserve down to about 365 million barrels, some fifty million below its pre-war level, and is now emptying it at a record weekly pace, into a hurricane season that began this week. The floor under crude is not supply and demand. It is a government spending down its emergency tank to keep the screen calm.
That is the trade hiding in plain sight. Right now every spike is a rumor and every dip is a subsidy, and that arrangement holds only as long as the reserve lasts and the water stays quiet.
So watch two gauges, not the headlines. Watch whether the reserve releases slow, because that is the floor thinning beneath the price. And watch whether anything finally moves on the water, a mine, a seizure, a struck hull, because that is the one shock a depleted reserve can no longer fully absorb. The day a real supply event lands on a reserve drawn too low is the day the spikes stop coming back.
The barrels stopped voting months ago. The only thing still trading is hope, and hope is the one commodity no government can release from a reserve.
https://
open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans
lemperera/p/clearing-sovereignty?r=6p7b5o&utm_medium=ios
“You are no longer watching an oil market. You are watching a market that trades the odds of a peace deal and prints the answer on an oil ticker.”
I honestly belive its AI trading the markets no humans, and as such we aren’t watching markets anymore but the circle jerk of code trading based on headlines.
This will end badly, that is allowing AI to trade off headlines.
In other news, the chocolate ration has been increased to 20 grams.
“Epstein? Epstein who?”
Go away with Epstein. You’ll probably find him in the Bahamas with a lot of other old spies, telling war stories about how they put things over on the public.
The US have a government by corporations, from corporations, for corporations. Just like the Founding Oligarchs intended.
Well I already knew he DGAH about the American people, only his corporate masters. Shocking, but also among the least surprising things I’ve heard someone say this week.
“Trump’s Economic Director Claims….”
Oh, well that settles it, then.
They misspelled economic infector
The Trump administration is living in the same fantasy world as Hoover in the summer of 1929.
Spouting platitudes and lies of how great things are…
Investors are piling in with all the discipline of a MAGA drunk at a bar on Friday night.
But worse than 1929, the drunks are in debt to the tune or $40 trillion (>125% of GDP) and mired deeply in war on the behalf of a foreign nation. This theologic war, against an enemy that is multiplying the chaos of the war against it ~ into a regional economic disaster.
Rest assured that oil prices will continue higher as supplies are burned and reserves depleted. Fertilizer and fuel shortages are resulting in failing Indian rice crops that directly threaten 1.3 billion in India, and indirectly another 1.7 billion in peripheral Western Asia.
The wolves are at the door and the US is being led by an infantile malignant narcissist with no regard for the consequences experienced by his victims.
Trump brought the world economy to a standstill during covid and now he is throwing napalm on global conflicts. He is likely to do worse to our global economy this time. Our allies are disillusioned with our aggression, lack of tact and bully style diplomacy.
A massive global boycott of American products is looming.
As a farmer, I love America, but fear the Trump administration.
Trump has supposedly sold China soybeans three times! Yet none are being shipped there. WTF?
Who does Trump work for?
I refuse to love anything that cannot love me back.
Good comment, but I’m not worried about being loved back.
I am worried about global conflict, starvation or being killed by a malignant narcissist and his intolerant sycophants.
When the world starts starving, farmers can finally sell those soybeans! Genius!
Genius… Really?
Sell soy to starving people on the other side of the earth? What will they buy them with if they are impoverished or their nation does not import them?
Last year it was difficult to store crops at the end of the harvest season here in the US but that did not solve hunger in war torn or impoverished Africa.
Or do you have a plan like “run and hide” for that too?
“run and hide” more like prioritize and optimize (me).
You’re the one that supported these republican fools your whole life, their blood is on your hands Frosty. Chill with that….
And that soy bean thing was sarcasm.
That was in response to your comment about loving your country.
“Investors are piling in with all the discipline of a MAGA drunk at a bar on Friday night.”
One thing many don’t realize is how many international investors are pouring money into the US markets. It’s for a mumber of reasons: (1) their own country is marred in economic decline (Canada for example just went into a recession), and (2) their own govt rates are too low to profit given the inflation they are experiencing (you’ll see them move from US debt into US markets soon as well pushing both rates and the markets up even more).
These factors (and more) cause investors to seek the most stable, long term producing investments to put there money. And believe it or not that’s the American market currently (think abou it the association US markets have with being backed by the Reserve Currency as well).
I believe at some point faith in the US markets (and currency) will collapse, but probably a few years off from that. As I see US markets going to nose bleed levels and beyond. Not because the US economy is doing good, or better (quite the opposite) but because it’s the only game in town turning a profit (and one tied to one of the most liquid assets in the world the US dollar, at least for now).
Well frosty. You got to throw in a good chance of drought across a good chunk of the planet. Looks pretty good for a super le nino.
Personally i think the upper end of things want chaos. When we are all fighting and worried it will be easy for them to get people to rally behind them.
That is the movers and shakers that fund the republican machine.
Just like Trump, Hassett’s response is the “tell”–it’s failing faster than ever
(NewsNation) — Americans are struggling with credit card debt at levels not seen in more than a decade.
The percentage of credit card balances that were at least 90 days past due rose to 13.1 percent in the first quarter, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — up from 12.3 percent a year earlier and the highest quarterly reading since 2011.
Americans collectively owe more than $1.25 trillion in credit card debt, while the share of balances that are seriously delinquent has surged from around 8 percent in early 2023.
The roughly five-percentage-point jump over the past three years is steeper than the rise seen between 2007 and the 2010 peak, when 13.7 percent of credit card balances were at least 90 days late.
For the life of me, I never carried an interest paying balance on credit cards. The few times when I did, the interest was a promotional 0%, dully paid off on term.
They use credit cards to make ends meet, so for most, that is never a choice.
Credit card companies are loan sharks.
it is going up. Trump, his family and friends are making more money than they ever have. The overt transparent bribes, the conflicts of interests, the blatant insider trading their real income has skyrocketed.
I am sure the credit card companies are more than fine as they are charging 30% on these outstanding balances. I had a look at my credit card statement the other day. It told me that if I make the minimum payment on my card it will be paid off in 90.3 years. WTF? People must be very desperate or have no financial sense to run a balance on their cards.
It is astonishing how stupid the average person is about this stuff.
Lets be a bit forgiving here. 1) it is made as difficult as possible to understand debt costs. For every 120IQ person there is one with 80. Good luck understanding the credit Card small print. 2) it is proven that people under financial stress become very good at managing short term problems. At the expense of long term challenges because that is the trade off the human brain makes. 3) society is driving on cheap labor and is designed to keep the poor poor.
I think that if you were to look into people’s financial mess you would find very few that are solely responsible for their situation. Noone acts in a vacuum.
Smiles Hassett
Two administrative rules are paramount:
1) Follow Goebbels “big lie” theory.
2) Kiss the ass of the great one.
I may have reversed the order….
Confirmed.
And Trump knows who runs the economy best:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRndMiVIB-w
Do worry, Trump & Walrus will find a way to make things even worse.™
“Delinquency is different from default, and there’s not any financial threat to the credit card companies.“
There is one thing more important than voters drowning in credit card debt and that is the shareholders of the credit card companies who fund congressional campaigns.
Holmes, with all due respect, there are a LOT of people more important as a practical matter than the voters.
The voters are an afterthought at best.
Trump’s main criterion for hiring someone is that they be an imbecile. It’s like hiring a midget to make you look taller. He wants Bill Pulte to be Director of National Intelligence. If he fires Rubio, he’ll probably replace him with Kid Rock. Or Nugent.
President Camacho lives!
I watch that documentary every four years. I keep thinking that we’ve still got a little while, then I realize, nope, we’re living in “Idiocracy” – right now.
Trump makes his personnel picks based on loyalty to him, willingness to do his bidding and whether they have that “Central Casting” look. I doubt he truly cares about their intelligence at all. Contrast that with Lincoln’s Team of Rivals. Who had the better Cabinet?
Farm News Media has a recent headline that Trump is cutting agricultural equipment tariffs to 15%. I got a chuckle out of the following quote as if it were fact:
“Through negotiations and the strategic use of tariffs, President Trump has secured trillions in private and foreign investment to bring jobs and manufacturing back to the United States and the American people,” The White House wrote in a fact sheet on recent tariff changes.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Yet most farmers continue to drink the Kool-Aid and act like Trump is going to save them. Farming publications are failing to fact check what they report and parroting Trump administration lies. Farming equipment sales are down, way down.
During the great recession, farm and construction equipment piled up at distributors as it was repossessed. New tractor sales down 11.3% year-over-year, and 9.4% year-to-date. Lots of used equipment is hitting the market at serious discounts.
Jonathan Karl still has a job?
UAW shop American Axle is striking. Despite your thesis, Mish, that unions are a cause for inflation, American Axle took a pay cut in 2008 to save GM. They went from $29/hour to $14.50/hour and half of them (about 2000) lost their jobs anyway. GM became profitable in 2010 profiting $4.7B. Now, in 2026, almost 20 years later, with GM spending $10+ billion on buybacks and dividends every year, those workers still aren’t back to what they were making in 2008. Most are making $22/hour.
That’s pretty much the story in manufacturing. The lucky ones are making the $30-35 even though that’s what they’ve been making for 20-30 years. The unlucky ones are getting $15ish to work life-threatening jobs. Many through as revolving temp hires with no or severely reduced benefits. So again, the lucky ones have had no real increase despite 20 years of surging inflation.
These jobs should be paying $60-75/hour, but even the “greedy” unions can’t keep up with inflation. And in the case of American Axle, can’t even get them back to pre-2008.
A side point is that the wages and benefits unions negotiate drive the wages and benefits of non-union employees (Engineers, Project Managers, etc.) Once, I mentioned to a newer non-union director at a break in a negotiation “You know, if our side is successful in holding the line on health care cuts, you too will get the same benefit.” A light came on.
Of course, you have to be in an industry in demand. In this case, private utility.
If a bit of truth originates from this administration, it is a total accident and unlikely to happen again.
They’re channeling their inner Bhagdad Bob.
It means that somebody was drunk.
Almost everything coming out of the White House is a lie. It’s very corrosive to America, and Americans rightly feel serious insecurity about their future. This is the worst and most corrupt presidency in my lifetime, but my real worry is that America’s debt bomb will explode in our face….like the 1930s and 1940s…..which was a liquidation of massive debt that lasted 20 years.
– but my real worry is that America’s debt bomb will explode in our face….like the 1930s and 1940s.
> I am worried about the same thing! Because this is why and what occurred during this period. Our Country can’t handle another disaster such as this was!
Elections were held on November 4, 1930. The Republicans lost fifty-two seats to the Democratic Party in the House of Representatives. This allowed the Democrats to take control of the chamber. The election was a victory for progressives.
The Democratic Party was in office during the 1930s and 1940s, particularly under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who served from 1933 to 1945.
Year Event Party in Power
1932 Roosevelt elected as President = Democratic Party
1933-1945 Implementation of New Deal programs = Democratic Party
1941-1945 U.S. involvement in World War II = Democratic Part
Please not again!!!
The permanent blinders on those who have complacently assumed that bought and paid for governments are immovable and irreplaceable guarantees the American experiment will fail. (Pure) Capitalism has a vector that Piketty has shown accelerates until it completely breaks. We are riding a rocket to hell and I don’t have any answers. Choosing the opposite of capitalism is equally untenable. China, and the Chinese experiment has lifted the greatest number of people out of poverty in history and has simultaneously emerged as a world economic power. Again, not advocating for mimicking the Chinese path but I am advocating for attempting something new/different. (Please to those who may reply with “whataboutisms”, the discussion may generally profit from suggesting solutions instead of defensive invective.)
Failed monetary and fiscal policies are the ball and chain around America’s neck, not capitalism. In China, their move toward capitalism and global mercantilism is the structural change lifting millions out of poverty, not the “Chinese experiment”.
As for a suggestion, how about the federal government spending less than revenue and how about the fed returning to their real stable prices goal with courage? All the gimmicks to get more than we can afford are now maturing to their endpoint and America is not prepared to pay the piper for past malfeasance. We can cut the spending in the areas of our choice, painful as that might be, or we can muddle along exercising the same gimmicks and let Mr. Market make the choices for us, but for sure, the situation will get resolved.
I have made similar comments in the past and received replies along the lines that balancing the budget is impossible. Maybe so, but reconciliation of our debt mess will take place on our terms or the markets. America faced this situation after WW1 and the Spanish flu pandemic: our response was to cut federal spending by more than half which resulted in the roaring twenties that arguably ended with one contributor being too much debt. America applied the same strategy again after WW2 that resulted in economic prosperity. Since Nixon ended dollar convertibility to gold, the only solution to every problem has been print and spend more money.
We have done it before; we can do it again, with patriotic leadership and citizens’ willingness to suffer sever short term pain for long term prosperity. If we do not, consider the future you leave to your kids and grandkids.
So sorry, but it’s the Communist Chinese Party. They control everything that happens in China. To process to become a party member roots out unstable dummies like Donald J. Trump and Elon Musk (the abject idiocy of DOGE and his Trump endorsement {LMAO}). The Chinese Communists are extremely smart. We’re not. They’re just barely getting started; you’re talking about cutting spending and severe pain.
Yet they raised hundreds of millions out of poverty in a decade. What has the Usonian government done for you lately?
Two thoughts – one capitalism works great when constrained and of course we can argue endlessly on how much constraint is needed. The problem now is that there is so much corruption so one thing we could do is get rid of gerrymandering, create voting districts based on squares in each state so we would again have competitive elections and hopefully take some of the corruption out of government. Two slash defense spending a lot so Congress is not so beholden to the defense contractors. Make real capitalism work, not the one that is dependent on government contracts. Now that drones are the wav of the future, get rid of the redundant and unnecessary equipment.
The Trump Administration’s lies are just more obvious. The lying has been going on for decades. Empire of Lies.
They have so much contempt for the American people at this point that they just lie when they don’t even have to. Just for a laugh.
Why shouldn’t they have contempt for the American people? For years, they have lapped up the most obvious bullshit and asked for more.
Re: America’s debt bomb
The financial system is far more sophisticated than it was in 1929-1932. In 1932, the US was on the gold standard, and the notional value of debt was far, far higher than the actual value of gold. So when the banks and called in their loans in gold, and there wasn’t enough gold, the banks and the economy had to collapse.
Compare that to 2008,when the notional value of mortgage backed securities was far higher than the actual value of mortgagees actual ability to pay those mortgages. The housing market collapsed, but the Fed stepped in and rained fiat money on the banks by buying MBSs at their notional value to prop up the market and keep it from a repeat of the GD.
The modern system creates some juicy new problems for sure, but a repeat of the GD isn’t one of them.
Maybe not a repeat of the GD. But historically, the Panic of 1873 was called the “Great Depression” up until the 1930’s when of course the true Great Depression occurred. The Panic then got renamed as the “Long Depression.” Its cause was the popping of the railroad stock bubble. Right now we have something in 2008 called the “Great Financial Crash”. I suggest in a few years it will need a name change to something like the “Mortgage Bubble Bust” when the true GFC happens.
Almost everything???
Even if incomes are keeping up with inflation (which I doubt), there’s something demoralizing about getting a “raise” and finding out it means nothing. You think you’re going to be a little better off and then you realize you’re not. Like you can’t catch a break.
Anything taxed on a % basis means the government is the biggest beneficiary of inflation.
Yes. The “progressive” income tax exacerbates that.
It does, because the brackets, if adjusted, are always done months or years after the inflation.
Hassett is just cheer leader.
He is cheerleading the Narcissist