John Burn-Murdoch Profile picture
Columnist and chief data reporter @FinancialTimes | Stories, stats & scatterplots | Senior fellow @LSEdataScience | john.burn-murdoch@ft.com

Apr 4, 11 tweets

NEW 🧵

A quick thread of charts showing how Trump’s economic agenda is going so far:

1) Trump has had the same impact on economic uncertainty as a global pandemic.

2) That was just the US version.

What’s particularly impressive is that he’s managed this on a global scale.

Starting to get the feeling that “Trump” annotation is going to be the chart equivalent of a layer of volcanic ash in the fossil record.

3) US consumers are reacting very very negatively.

These are the worst ratings for any US government’s economic policy since records began.

4) Well over half of Americans expect the economy to deteriorate over the next year, again the highest figure ever recorded.

5) People are also very very worried about job losses.

6) Just 25% of US adults say they expect their finances to look better in five years than today.

That’s lower even than at the nadir of the Great Recession.

7) This one is fun:

Remember when Trump won the “inflation election”, as voters united behind him because they were p***ed off with rising prices?

Fast forward a few months and Americans’ inflation expectations are now as high as they were at the peak of Biden-era price rises.

8) This one is important.

For all the talk about the powerful pro-Trump media ecosystem, the share of Americans who have heard negative business news coverage of the government has exploded.

Even the podcast bros can’t distract Americans from the realities of the stock market.

9/9 On the same dynamic:

Trump’s approval is holding up well with Maga, but he’s rapidly losing support among the rest of the coalition who voted for him in November.

Or to put it another way, the view from inside the Maga echo chamber remains rosy. Outside, not so much...

More in this week’s column:

Trump’s tariffs are what you get when you put an erratic strongman in charge of the economy

Someone like Trump doesn’t just own the libs, moderates and conservatives take the hit too.

ft.com/content/26d15d…

And worth viewing all this within the context of this previous thread/piece:

This US government is just completely unlike anything else we’ve seen from a major western country in the postwar era.

Different values, different goals, different everything

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