How are state and local governments faring post-COVID? It's a pretty different picture than what we're seeing with the federal budget deficit. States enjoyed generous federal aid and surprisingly strong tax collections during the pandemic. In 2021, state governments were flush — sometimes, they even made responsible choices, making deposits into their pension funds and building up their rainy-day funds to extremely high levels. Other states committed to new programs and spending. Now it's a mixed bag. To talk about how the states are managing all of that, I talked to Yale Law School professor David Schleicher, an expert on state and local government finance, for a wide-ranging conversation about how states have (and have not) learned the lessons of their budget crises from the Great Recession, and how they’re adjusting to once-again lean times.

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We are back with Peter Suderman’s semi-annual visit to the Very Serious podcast! Getting ready for spring, Peter and I talked about best practices for muddling fresh fruit into cocktails. We talked about Peter’s philosophy of the 41-bottle bar, about his favorite non-alcoholic cocktails, and about why he has no use for vodka. We also talked about “x-tini” cocktails — relics of the bad old days (the 1980s and the 1990s) when bars would mix together any brightly colored fruit liqueur with spirits and sour mix and who knows what else and call the drink some kind of “-tini.” But we also talked about a silver lining of that age — the espresso martini, birthed then and once again popular today, which Peter has methods for improving (think gin or mezcal).

Visit joshbarro.com for a transcript of this episode and links for the books, bottles and recipes we reference.

We’re back with another episode of the Very Serious podcast, and this episode has a friend of the show: Prof. Jason Furman, who teaches economics at Harvard.

Or, as Jason put it to me, he’s a bit of a foul-weather friend of the show:

Jason: Inflation does fluctuate a bit. Sometimes it looks a little bit better — during those times, you don't have me on your show. Sometimes it looks a little bit worse, and then you desperately call me and want me back on your show.

I suggested that the Jason Furman Very Serious Index could be yet another inflation indicator to keep an eye on, among all the others.

Jason: Yeah. And the big open question is, is that a lagging indicator of past inflation, or does that help us predict future inflation?

Indeed, the inflation outlook has worsened in the last few months. It looked like we were making progress in cooling inflation toward the end of 2022, but after a combination of revisions to data and hotter reports in recent months, it now looks like we haven’t actually made much progress at all. At the same time, the economy has continued to show decent growth and strong job gains — a set of facts that have economic analysts talking less about soft and hard landings and more about “no landing”: the possibility that we will avoid recession for a substantial period while also experiencing persistently too-high inflation.

I talked with Jason about why inflation hasn’t come down much despite the Fed’s substantial interest rate increases, what can be done to tame inflation over the next year, and how we have ended up with the Fed as “the only game in town” — with monetary policy being the only useful policy lever, even if it is an imperfect one, for taming inflation.