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Experts thought they knew how the economy worked. After the pandemic, they’re not so sure. on December 7, 2023 at 11:00 am Business News | The Hill

Published

2 years ago

December 7, 2023

The American economy, while never simple, was at least somewhat understood — until the pandemic upended even the most basic assumptions, experts told The Hill this week.

From the recession that didn’t happen, to the relationship between unemployment and inflation, to the reason that inflation took off in the first place, to the disconnect between national economic performance and people’s experience of it, to the efficacy of interest rate hikes — American economics and the people who follow it are having an identity crisis.

It’s not clear how it’s going to resolve.

Some economists feel vindicated by what they’ve seen play out, while others have changed their positions. Others have suggested entirely new models are needed and have encountered pushback from colleagues on that suggestion as well.

But no matter how you frame it, it’s undeniable that where there once was confidence, now a fretful mood has descended over a discipline trying to reconcile long-held dogmas with the near-wartime economic conditions brought on by the pandemic and the sensational recovery that followed.

“What you have is a shake-up of economics here in the United States, because we’re having a shift again,” Richard Wolff, emeritus professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a visiting professor at the New School, told The Hill.

“It remains to be seen in this episode to what extent the normal relationships of many, many kinds — labor, spending, inflation and others — will go back to their pre-pandemic norms, or will be permanently perturbed,” former Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Alan Blinder, a Princeton University economist, told The Hill.

Blinder, who oversaw a period of quantitative tightening in the mid-1990s during the Clinton administration, said the very efficacy of monetary policy is now up for debate.

A quasi-wartime economy plays by different rules

Economists see the end of World War II, when debt-to-gross domestic product (GDP) ratios were about as high as where they are today and inflation was above 10 percent, as a point of comparison for the economy of today.

“The only real precedent that I can identify to the pandemic-era exertion of state control over the economy would be the two world wars,” Daniel Sargent, a professor of the history of public policy at the University of California, told The Hill in an interview.

“It’s also significant that some of the statutory authority that the federal government leaned upon in order to exercise the degree of control that it did derived from [the] Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917,” Sargent added.

While the economy of the 1970s also experienced a series of state interventions, including price controls as part of the “Nixon shock” intended to resolve inflation, the deficit spending of the pandemic makes the post-World War II period the most relevant analogue for today’s economy, Sargent said.

The sudden switch to such a high level of state intervention is likely a central reason that many traditional assumptions have broken down.

The comparison to the post-WWII period was also top of mind for Harvard University economist Stephen Marglin.

“During the pandemic, the same thing happened [as during the war]. There weren’t the civilian goods being produced, and people did get money, but they couldn’t spend it because the economy was shut down, just like the civilian economy had been shut down during WWII. That’s the analogy,” he told The Hill.

Marglin said that a doctrinal shift within economics akin to those that reshaped the discipline in the 1930s and again in the 1970s “probably should happen” but that he wasn’t seeing any immediate signs of a major course correction.

Causes of inflation spark debate but unite major thinkers

While the nation’s current battle with inflation has sparked a small industry of rhetorical debate, many experts The Hill spoke to said there’s an implicit agreement among different camps that stitches the different arguments together.

Republicans and conservative economists tend to argue that inflation was caused primarily by the trillions in deficit spending the government sent out to bolster households and businesses during lockdowns.

Democrats and liberal economists focus on muddled supply chains and even corporate greed as the primary drivers.

But the private-sector response to the public-sector spending spans both these explanations, economists say.

“What we had was a situation in which corporations across America understood that the money pumped into the economy to cope with the crash that we were due to have, coupled with the pandemic, was an extraordinary time. The government pumped in enormous amounts of money, enormous amounts of fiscal stimulus, and this made it possible to raise prices to improve profitability,” the New School’s Richard Wolff said.

While the cash injection into the economy made it possible for companies to raise their prices, it also allowed people to keep spending money, helping to stave off recession.

“The central view, I feel, is totally vindicated,” Hoover Institution economist and former University of Chicago finance professor John Cochrane told The Hill. “The central reason we got inflation is the government printed up about $3 trillion and borrowed another $2 trillion, and sent people checks.”

“That’s also consistent with why inflation eased, even without the Fed really doing anything,” he added. “It did not repeat 1980 to 1982 when interest rates were well below inflation even after the Fed started raising them. A one time fiscal blowout raises the price level, so you get a burst of inflation that eventually goes away.”

So why haven’t we seen a recession?

“A US recession is effectively certain in the next 12 months,” Bloomberg News reported in October of last year, citing its own economic model.

“The latest recession probability models by Bloomberg economists … forecast a higher recession probability across all timeframes, with the 12-month estimate of a downturn by October 2023 hitting 100 percent,” the economists found — erroneously.

Some big-time financial players got swept up in the groupthink on recession.

Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan predicted a “mild recession” in 2023, and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said a “hurricane” was forming over the economy.

Even the Federal Reserve predicted a “mild recession” in March before pulling that call later in the year.

Those economists could be forgiven for their confusion: Usually, after a central bank raises interest rates by more than 500 basis points, which makes financing more expensive for both businesses and consumers, the economy slows down.

Not so in 2023. Quarterly GDP growth has exceeded 2 percent for the last five quarters, rising as high as 5.2 percent annualized in the third quarter. Corporate profits have been through the roof.

Princeton’s Alan Blinder said the channels by which the Fed slowed the economy in the mid-1990s seem to have dried up during the current cycle.

“I can tell you for sure, though we didn’t relish enunciating this, that what we thought we were doing is slowing the economy down by putting the squeeze on the auto industry and housing. Neither of those channels seem very much to have worked this time,” he said.

Dean Baker, an economist with the Center for Economic Policy and Research, told The Hill much the same thing.

“It didn’t work through the usual channels,” he said, specifically citing new housing starts, which were relatively unresponsive to Fed rate hikes, as well as an unexpectedly strong performance of net exports.

Severed links between employment, inflation and interest rates

Perhaps the most central relationships that have been thrown into doubt are those between the rate of inflation, the level of interest rates and the level of employment.

Higher and rising prices are correlated through labor costs with higher levels of employment. And higher interest rates, which squeeze the economy, are associated with lower employment and therefore lower prices.

But as the Fed raised rates, and the annual inflation rate descended from 9 percent to just above 3 percent over the past year and a half, unemployment stayed below 4 percent the whole time. This breaks the rule.

“[Rate hikes] didn’t have the effect that just about any of us expected. If you told me the Fed was going to raise rates to 5.25 percent and the unemployment rate was going to remain under 4 percent, I wouldn’t have believed you,” Baker told The Hill.

Does Wall Street reflect America’s real economy anymore?

Surging profitability within the economy, which reached its highest level after the pandemic since the 1920s as a share of gross domestic income, has done little to raise the public’s economic mood.

Profits from current production increased $105.7 billion in the third quarter, compared with an increase of $6.9 billion in the second quarter, Commerce Department data released last week shows.

About 58 percent of Americans own stock in Wall Street companies, according to the Fed’s latest survey of consumer finances.

But that ownership is overwhelmingly skewed toward the extremely rich. In fact, the 99th to 100th percentile of richest households own the majority of all corporate equities in the U.S., a distribution that took off after the pandemic and is near a record high.

While the top 1 percent owns more than half of the stock market, the bottom 50 percent owns less than 1 percent of it.

That may be why just 19 percent of U.S. adults rate economic conditions as excellent or good “while 46 percent say conditions are only fair and 35 percent rate the economy as poor,” as public opinion researchers at Pew found earlier this year.

Despite many ostensibly excellent metrics spanning employment, GDP and decelerating inflation, public approval of President Biden’s economic stewardship is low. Only 32 percent of Americans think Biden is doing a good job with the economy, according to Gallup.

While wage growth has just about kept pace with price growth over the pandemic, longer-term trends in income distribution are almost certainly adding to Americans’ melancholy.

While the profit share of the economy hit 8.5 percent in 2022 and has been generally rising since around 1990, the share of the economy devoted to paying workers has fallen dramatically since 1970, dropping from about 51.6 percent on national income to 43.1 percent now.

“We really do need additional tools for combatting supply chain issues and excess demand. The reliance on this one sledgehammer of Federal Reserve interest policy is not very good,” Harvard’s Marglin told The Hill.

Traditional divisions between monetary policy, which is handled mainly by the Fed, and fiscal policy, which is handled by Congress, mean that even while the field of economics may be going through a period of change, policymakers may have limited tools to turn those changes into reality.

Administration, Business, International, News, Policy, corporate profits, economics, inflation, Interest rates, unemployment, US economy, Wages The American economy, while never simple, was at least somewhat understood — until the pandemic upended even the most basic assumptions, experts told The Hill this week. From the recession that didn’t happen, to the relationship between unemployment and inflation, to the reason that inflation took off in the first place, to the disconnect between…

Business

How Epstein’s Cash Shaped Artists, Agencies, and Algorithms

Published

3 weeks ago

February 16, 2026

Bolanle Media Staff

Jeffrey Epstein’s money did more than buy private jets and legal leverage. It flowed into the same ecosystem that decides which artists get pushed to the front, which research gets labeled “cutting edge,” and which stories about race and power are treated as respectable debate instead of hate speech. That doesn’t mean he sat in a control room programming playlists. It means his worldview seeped into institutions that already shape what we hear, see, and believe.

The Gatekeepers and Their Stains

The fallout around Casey Wasserman is a vivid example of how this works. Wasserman built a powerhouse talent and marketing agency that controls a major slice of sports, entertainment, and the global touring business. When the Epstein files revealed friendly, flirtatious exchanges between Wasserman and Ghislaine Maxwell, and documented his ties to Epstein’s circle, artists and staff began to question whose money and relationships were quietly underwriting their careers.

That doesn’t prove Epstein “created” any particular star. But it shows that a man deeply entangled with Epstein was sitting at a choke point: deciding which artists get representation, which tours get resources, which festivals and campaigns happen. In an industry built on access and favor, proximity to someone like Epstein is not just gossip; it signals which values are tolerated at the top.

When a gatekeeper with that history sits between artists and the public, “the industry” stops being an abstract machine and starts looking like a web of human choices — choices that, for years, were made in rooms where Epstein’s name wasn’t considered a disqualifier.

Funding Brains, Not Just Brands

Epstein’s interest in culture didn’t end with celebrity selfies. He was obsessed with the science of brains, intelligence, and behavior — and that’s where his money begins to overlap with how audiences are modeled and, eventually, how algorithms are trained.

He cultivated relationships with scientists at elite universities and funded research into genomics, cognition, and brain development. In one high‑profile case, a UCLA professor specializing in music and the brain corresponded with Epstein for years and accepted funding for an institute focused on how music affects neural circuits. On its face, that looks like straightforward philanthropy. Put it next to his email trail and a different pattern appears.

Epstein’s correspondence shows him pushing eugenics and “race science” again and again — arguing that genetic differences explain test score gaps between Black and white people, promoting the idea of editing human beings under the euphemism of “genetic altruism,” and surrounding himself with thinkers who entertained those frames. One researcher in his orbit described Black children as biologically better suited to running and hunting than to abstract thinking.

So you have a financier who is:

Funding brain and behavior research.
Deeply invested in ranking human groups by intelligence.
Embedded in networks that shape both scientific agendas and cultural production.

None of that proves a specific piece of music research turned into a specific Spotify recommendation. But it does show how his ideology was given time, money, and legitimacy in the very spaces that define what counts as serious knowledge about human minds.

How Ideas Leak Into Algorithms

There is another layer that is easier to see: what enters the knowledge base that machines learn from.

Fringe researchers recently misused a large U.S. study of children’s genetics and brain development to publish papers claiming racial hierarchies in IQ and tying Black people’s economic outcomes to supposed genetic deficits. Those papers then showed up as sources in answers from large AI systems when users asked about race and intelligence. Even after mainstream scientists criticized the work, it had already entered both the academic record and the training data of systems that help generate and rank content.

Epstein did not write those specific papers, but he funded the kind of people and projects that keep race‑IQ discourse alive inside elite spaces. Once that thinking is in the mix, recommendation engines and search systems don’t have to be explicitly racist to reproduce it. They simply mirror what’s in their training data and what has been treated as “serious” research.

Zoomed out, the pipeline looks less like a neat conspiracy and more like an ecosystem:

Wealthy men fund “edgy” work on genes, brains, and behavior.
Some of that work revives old racist ideas with new data and jargon.
Those studies get scraped, indexed, and sometimes amplified by AI systems.
The same platforms host and boost music, video, and news — making decisions shaped by engagement patterns built on biased narratives.

The algorithm deciding what you see next is standing downstream from all of this.

The Celebrity as Smoke Screen

Epstein’s contact lists are full of directors, actors, musicians, authors, and public intellectuals. Many now insist they had no idea what he was doing. Some probably didn’t; others clearly chose not to ask. From Epstein’s perspective, the value of those relationships is obvious.

Being seen in orbit around beloved artists and cultural figures created a reputational firewall. If the public repeatedly saw him photographed with geniuses, Oscar winners, and hit‑makers, their brains filed him under “eccentric patron” rather than “dangerous predator.”

That softens the landing for his ideas, too. Race science sounds less toxic when it’s discussed over dinner at a university‑backed salon or exchanged in emails with a famous thinker.

The more oxygen is spent on the celebrity angle — who flew on which plane, who sat at which dinner — the less attention is left for what may matter more in the long run: the way his money and ideology were welcomed by institutions that shape culture and knowledge.

Ghislaine Maxwell seen alongside Jeffrey Epstein in newly-released Epstein files from the DOJ. (DOJ)

What to Love, Who to Fear

The point is not to claim that Jeffrey Epstein was secretly programming your TikTok feed or hand‑picking your favorite rapper. The deeper question is what happens when a man with his worldview is allowed to invest in the people and institutions that decide:

Which artists are “marketable.”
Which scientific questions are “important.”
Which studies are “serious” enough to train our machines on.
Which faces and stories are framed as aspirational — and which as dangerous.

If your media diet feels saturated with certain kinds of Black representation — hyper‑visible in music and sports, under‑represented in positions of uncontested authority — while “objective” science quietly debates Black intelligence, that’s not random drift. It’s the outcome of centuries of narrative work that men like Epstein bought into and helped sustain.

No one can draw a straight, provable line from his bank account to a specific song or recommendation. But the lines he did draw — to elite agencies, to brain and music research, to race‑obsessed science networks — are enough to show this: his money was not only paying for crimes in private. It was also buying him a seat at the tables where culture and knowledge are made, where the stories about who to love and who to fear get quietly agreed upon.

Bill Clinton and English musician Mick Jagger in newly-released Epstein files from the DOJ. (DOJ)

A Challenge to Filmmakers and Creatives

For anyone making culture inside this system, that’s the uncomfortable part: this isn’t just a story about “them.” It’s also a story about you.

Filmmakers, showrunners, musicians, actors, and writers all sit at points where money, narrative, and visibility intersect. You rarely control where the capital ultimately comes from, but you do control what you validate, what you reproduce, and what you challenge.

Questions worth carrying into every room:

Whose gaze are you serving when you pitch, cast, and cut?
Which Black characters are being centered — and are they full humans or familiar stereotypes made safe for gatekeepers?
When someone says a project is “too political,” “too niche,” or “bad for the algorithm,” whose comfort is really being protected?
Are you treating “the industry” as a neutral force, or as a set of human choices you can push against?

If wealth like Epstein’s can quietly seep into agencies, labs, and institutions that decide what gets made and amplified, then the stories you choose to tell — and refuse to tell — become one of the few levers of resistance inside that machine. You may not control every funding source, but you can decide whether your work reinforces a world where Black people are data points and aesthetics, or one where they are subjects, authors, and owners.

The industry will always have its “gatekeepers.” The open question is whether creatives accept that role as fixed, or start behaving like counter‑programmers: naming the patterns, refusing easy archetypes, and building alternative pathways, platforms, and partnerships wherever possible. In a landscape where money has long been used to decide what to love and who to fear, your choices about whose stories get light are not just artistic decisions. They are acts of power.

Business

New DOJ Files Reveal Naomi Campbell’s Deep Ties to Jeffrey Epstein

Published

4 weeks ago

February 11, 2026

Bolanle Media Staff

In early 2026, the global conversation surrounding the “Epstein files” has reached a fever pitch as the Department of Justice continues to un-redact millions of pages of internal records. Among the most explosive revelations are detailed email exchanges between Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein that directly name supermodel Naomi Campbell. While Campbell has long maintained she was a peripheral figure in Epstein’s world, the latest documents—including an explicit message where Maxwell allegedly offered “two playmates” for the model—have forced a national re-evaluation of her proximity to the criminal enterprise.

The Logistics of a High-Fashion Connection

The declassified files provide a rare look into the operational relationship between the supermodel and the financier. Flight logs and internal staff emails from as late as 2016 show that Campbell’s travel was frequently subsidized by Epstein’s private fleet. In one exchange, Epstein’s assistants discussed the urgency of her travel requests, noting she had “no backup plan” and was reliant on his jet to reach international events.

This level of logistical coordination suggests a relationship built on significant mutual favors, contrasting with Campbell’s previous descriptions of him as just another face in the crowd.

In Her Own Words: The “Sickened” Response

Campbell has not remained silent as these files have surfaced, though her defense has been consistent for years. In a widely cited 2019 video response that has been recirculated amid the 2026 leaks, she stated, “What he’s done is indefensible. I’m as sickened as everyone else is by it.” When confronted with photos of herself at parties alongside Epstein and Maxwell, she has argued against the concept of “guilt by association,” telling the press:

“I’ve always said that I knew him, as I knew many other people… I was introduced to him on my 31st birthday by my ex-boyfriend. He was always at the Victoria’s Secret shows.”

She has further emphasized her stance by aligning herself with those Epstein harmed, stating,

“I stand with the victims. I’m not a person who wants to see anyone abused, and I never have been.””

The Mystery of the “Two Playmates”

The most damaging piece of evidence in the recent 2026 release is an email where Maxwell reportedly tells Epstein she has “two playmates” ready for Campbell.

While the context of this “offer” remains a subject of intense debate—with some investigators suggesting it refers to the procurement of young women for social or sexual purposes—Campbell’s legal team has historically dismissed such claims as speculative. However, for a public already wary of elite power brokers, the specific wording used in these private DOJ records has created a “stop-the-scroll” moment that is proving difficult for the fashion icon to move past.

A Reputation at a Crossroads

As a trailblazer in the fashion industry, Campbell is now navigating a period where her professional achievements are being weighed against her presence in some of history’s most notorious social circles. The 2026 files don’t just name her; they place her within a broader system where modeling agents and scouts allegedly groomed young women under the guise of high-fashion opportunities. Whether these records prove a deeper complicity or simply illustrate the unavoidable overlap of the 1% remains the central question of the ongoing DOJ investigation.

Business

Google Accused Of Favoring White, Asian Staff As It Reaches $28 Million Deal That Excludes Black Workers

Published

3 months ago

December 12, 2025

Bolanle Media Staff

Google has tentatively agreed to a $28 million settlement in a California class‑action lawsuit alleging that white and Asian employees were routinely paid more and placed on faster career tracks than colleagues from other racial and ethnic backgrounds.

A Santa Clara County Superior Court judge has granted preliminary approval, calling the deal “fair” and noting that it could cover more than 6,600 current and former Google workers employed in the state between 2018 and 2024.

How The Discrimination Claims Emerged

The lawsuit was brought by former Google employee Ana Cantu, who identifies as Mexican and racially Indigenous and worked in people operations and cloud departments for about seven years. Cantu alleges that despite strong performance, she remained stuck at the same level while white and Asian colleagues doing similar work received higher pay, higher “levels,” and more frequent promotions.

Cantu’s complaint claims that Latino, Indigenous, Native American, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, and Alaska Native employees were systematically underpaid compared with white and Asian coworkers performing substantially similar roles. The suit also says employees who raised concerns about pay and leveling saw raises and promotions withheld, reinforcing what plaintiffs describe as a two‑tiered system inside the company.

Why Black Employees Were Left Out

Cantu’s legal team ultimately agreed to narrow the class to employees whose race and ethnicity were “most closely aligned” with hers, a condition that cleared the path to the current settlement.

The judge noted that Black employees were explicitly excluded from the settlement class after negotiations, meaning they will not share in the $28 million payout even though they were named in earlier versions of the case. Separate litigation on behalf of Black Google employees alleging racial bias in pay and promotions remains pending, leaving their claims to be resolved in a different forum.

What The Settlement Provides

Of the $28 million total, about $20.4 million is expected to be distributed to eligible class members after legal fees and penalties are deducted. Eligible workers include those in California who self‑identified as Hispanic, Latinx, Indigenous, Native American, American Indian, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, and/or Alaska Native during the covered period.

Beyond cash payments, Google has also agreed to take steps aimed at addressing the alleged disparities, including reviewing pay and leveling practices for racial and ethnic gaps. The settlement still needs final court approval at a hearing scheduled for later this year, and affected employees will have a chance to opt out or object before any money is distributed.