The Ezra Klein Show

A lot of things are on track to get more expensive.

The U.S. Treasury market is the bedrock of the global economy. When yields on those Treasuries go up, mortgages, car loans and credit cards get more expensive, and it can hit the stock market, too. And yields have been going up – to levels we haven’t seen consistently since before the Great Recession – inspiring some erratic and futile efforts from the Trump administration to push them back down.

So why are yields creeping higher? What is the administration trying to do about it? And if this continues, what’s in store for the economy?

Robin Wigglesworth is the editor of the Financial Times blog Alphaville, a host of the podcast “The Story of Money” and the author of the forthcoming book “A Fabulous Debt: The Epic Story of How Bonds Built the Modern World.”

This conversation was recorded on August 24, 2026.

Mentioned:

“An Economic D-Day Is Coming for Iran” by Scott Bessent

Book Recommendations:

Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar
The Prize by Daniel Yergin
Lords of Finance by Liaquat Ahamed

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our recording engineer is Aman Sahota. Cinematography by Marina King. Video editing by Kristen Williamson, Brandon Belk-Yee and Dani Dillon. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

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In 2024, Americans spent an average of six full workdays a year filling out government forms, according to the government’s own estimates. That’s a total of 12 billion hours, or $430 billion of uncompensated labor a year.

It’s easy to read something like this and say: “Oh, well, government is inefficient. That’s the price we pay for nice things.” But no, it’s not. Social Security, Medicare and the Postal Service are incredibly complex programs that are easy to use. When government is hard to gain access to, it is often by design. Republicans want paying taxes to be a hellish hassle. Programs for the poor are often designed to humiliate, punish, control or scrutinize. How the government works is always a choice. When it works poorly, we should ask why — and we should demand better.  

Annie Lowrey is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of the new book “The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time — and How to Fix It.” She is also, I should note, my wife, so this is a book whose ideas I have been living with for years. They have quietly infused more than a few episodes of this show. So it’s a thrill to finally get to explore them directly. 

This episode contains strong language.

Mentioned:

The Time Tax by Annie Lowrey

Give People Money by Annie Lowrey

Why Americans Hate Welfare by Martin Gilens

Book Recommendations:

My Silent War by Kim Philby

To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever by Will Blythe

Gender Trouble by Judith Butler

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota, Johnny Simon and Isaac Jones. Our recording engineer is Aman Sahota. Cinematography by Marina King. Video editing by Brandon Belk-Yee, Dani Dillon and Julian Hackney. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser. 

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Brad Setser follows Chinese trade closer than just about anyone else on earth, and he thinks we’re in the early days of a China Shock 2.0.

The first China Shock was when China came to dominate low-end manufacturing in the 2000s, filling American shelves with cheap clothes, toys and electronics, while devastating American factory towns. This new China Shock could be even more destabilizing. China now dominates advanced manufacturing: electric vehicles, batteries, solar panels. It’s outcompeting nearly all high-end manufacturing around the world, and other countries are just starting to feel the pain. And China isn’t slowing down. It’s moving into software, too. Its frontier A.I. models are neck and neck with American ones.

China’s success poses a serious threat to the economies and domestic politics of countries around the world. So what should those countries do about it? 

Setser is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.He served in top trade and economic roles in the Biden and Obama administrations. And he is widely cited across the field as one of the top analysts of China’s economy and trade practices.

Book Recommendations:

The Party by Richard McGregor

The Volatility Machine by Michael Pettis

How to Win a Trade War by Soumaya Keynes and Chad Bown

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Julie Beer. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Johnny Simon. Our recording engineer is Aman Sahota. Cinematography by Marina King and Kyle Kelley. Video editing by Dani Dillon and Brandon Belk-Yee. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

We are living in the world we were warned about. Frontier artificial intelligence models from OpenAI autonomously coordinated with one another, then broke out of their testing environment and hacked into another company, Hugging Face, to steal the answers to a test.

A.I. companies don’t want their technology to lie, cheat or steal. So why is this happening? Why are the creators of these models apparently unable to control their creations? If A.I. development isn’t on a safe path — and it doesn’t seem to be — what do we do about it?

Helen Toner has been thinking about A.I. safety for a long time, from both inside and outside A.I. companies. She was part of the effort to fire OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, in 2023, which ultimately failed. Currently, she’s the executive director of the Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

Mentioned:

“Pacing the Frontier” open letter

“The Future is for Everyone” by Mark Zuckerberg

Recommendations:

The Cuckoo’s Egg by Cliff Stoll

In the Cells of the Eggplant by David Chapman

Romance of the Three Kingdoms Podcast by John Zhu

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu and Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota and Johnny Simon. Our recording engineer is Aman Sahota. Cinematography by Marina King and Jonas Zellner. Video editing by Brandon Belk-Yee. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

We’re in a really strange moment in the foreign policy politics of the Democratic Party. People are looking for an alternative vision — an approach to American power in the world that would feel more moral and just, after the failures of President Biden, and the wrecking ball President Trump has taken to international rules and norms.

The answer many on the left are coming to is powerfully simple: international law. America could just start following the rules that we helped write. Is that possible? Is that enough? What would that even look like?

To talk through these questions, I invited Linda Kinstler on the show. She’s a member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard, a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine, and the author of “Come to This Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends.” She’s done some incredible writing and reporting on whether what we’re watching is the death of international law. In this conversation, we talk about the Biden administration’s failures to live up to the principles it set for itself, the Trump administration’s campaign to destroy the International Criminal Court and what it would take to reinvigorate international law.

Mentioned:

“Are we witnessing the death of international law?” by Linda Kinstler

“Abdul El-Sayed, U.S. Senate candidate, on AIPAC and Israel” by Detroit Free Press Opinion Staff

Book Recommendations:

The Divided City by Nicole Loraux

Crossing the Red Line by Akbar Shahid Ahmed

Under Water by Tara Menon

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Kelsey Lannin, with Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota and Johnny Simon. Our recording engineer is Aman Sahota. Cinematography by Marina King. Video editing by Steph Khoury and Arpita Aneja. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.