factors in play, demographic factors, the pandemic through a hammer in everything. i think if they say, look, here s what we know, here s what we don t know and we re doing the best we can, i think that s trust building. any one of the cross currents in the global economy now would be newsworthy and unsetting. and there are many. and coming out of this pandemic, we tried to measure the economy, is it recession, maybe not recession. we re just trying to get back to normal at this point. we re still reacting to a pandemic, and trying to figure out where we go from here. fair question about what would be normal in 2022 and going forward because i think another thing he has to address, and you talk about this, is possible we re just in a different era, that the u.s. economy and the world economy is moving to a new place where, you know, we can t expect 30 years of low, really low interest rates. i totally agree with that. i ve been writing that for some time. i have a new b
decision decision he and his team feel was the best one. they have been struggling to say how much this was going to cost. really didn t want to get into the specifics until last night. and what are they saying now about that? reporter: yeah, it has been a really interesting answer. we know that this, the white house made clear, they believe this will apply to 43 million borrowers. they believe if there is uptake from everybody, it could wipe away debt, all the debt from more than 20 million borrowers. the uptake is key. they don t know how many people are going to sign up from the program. we heard from karine jean-pierre last night, they have some analysis based en what they have been looking at right now and as you know better than anybody, the white house economic team has been modelling this out, try tong sure because of inflation concerns that things wouldn t be too exasperated if this was going to be put in place. they don t know how many people from the 43 million will app
we had 30 years where we have gotten used to easy money and many have been the beneficiaries of that. if you have stocks, a home, you ve done pretty well. if you re a younger person, if you re a minority, you haven t done as well. and people are starting to realize there is only so much that central bankers can do, right? they can jack up asset prices, they can make money flow through the economy, but they can t build a new factory, they can t retrain workers for jobs. they can t reform education. we need politicians to do that and we need businesses to step up. i think in the simplest terms, what is happening in the economy right now means is inflation hurts, every budget feels it, it is really something everyone knows. fixing that is something else that hurts. it is raising borrowing costs so that all of your debt and borrowing money to grow and expand costs more. the medicine doesn t taste so good and we need to know how does the fed feel about how much more medicine is coming.
that s critical. but i think we shouldn t put too much on what he says today and this is counterintuitive, here s why. a lot can change between now and the next september meeting and they have said they will be nimble. they have to be nimble. they have to keep an open mind about how much they re going to keep raising interest rates and how aggressively and for how long. a lot of the data points are backwards looking. in some ways they re scrambling to keep up with the data which is changing in real time. there is also a lot of trust building that that has to go on here. the fed has been behind inflation for a while now. i argued, christine knows this, that they should have raised rates far earlier, then we had the pandemic, then it was hard. they re struggling to catch up and they have to rebuild people s trust in the institution itself. how do you do that? great question. i think by being honest. honestly, christine s right, the two of us have never seen an economy that is this