A Gallup poll reported last year that just 15% of Americans said they had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in big business, a record low. Since then, fear of artificial intelligence has made matters worse. So why is big business increasingly unpopular in Donald Trump's America? What does it tell us about the state of the nation and the long-term strength of the world's largest economy?

On this week's Trumponomics, host Stephanie Flanders explores those questions with Bloomberg Opinion global business columnist Adrian Wooldridge. He says the root of this malaise may be a US corporate culture that's shifted from genuine risk-taking entrepreneurship toward a mix of oligarchic tech elites and bloated bureaucracies, fueled by market concentration and declining competition. Later, Flanders and Wooldridge explore whether AI will in turn disrupt these dominant firms or further entrench their power — and what the backlash against tech could mean for politics, capitalism and American democracy.

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Across developed markets, bond markets are staging a slow-motion car wreck. As Opinion columnist and senior markets editor John Authers puts it, the phenomenon is truly global. Authers and Robin J. Brooks, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former chief economist at the Institute of International Finance, join host Stephanie Flanders to explain why investors have turned sharply against government bonds across the world’s major developed economies — and how the fallout could affect us all.

Read John Authers's column here:
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-05-19/the-great-bond-car-wreck-in-slow-motion

And find Robin J. Brooks's substack here:
https://robinjbrooks.substack.com/p/liz-truss-bond-market-blow-ups

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Sebastian Mallaby of the Council on Foreign Relations and author of The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind and the Quest for Superintelligence joins host Stephanie Flanders. He says Chinese AI is closing the gap—and that means Washington can’t afford to ignore safety talks.

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As a high-stakes Trump–Xi summit looms, tensions over the Iran war and defiance of US sanctions threaten to derail what could be one of the year’s most consequential meetings. Stephanie Flanders is joined by Jennifer Welch, chief geoeconomics analyst for Bloomberg Economics and Bloomberg News executive editor Dan Ten Kate to unpack whether the talks will happen—and what’s really at stake for the global economy if they do.

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On the day of what could be Jerome Powell’s final Federal Reserve meeting as chair, Trumponomics shifts focus from a largely uneventful near-term outlook for rates to a more consequential question: what comes next under Kevin Warsh, Donald Trump’s pick to lead the central bank.

Host Stephanie Flanders is joined by Krishna Guha, Vice Chairman and Head of Economics and Central Bank Strategy at Evercore ISI.

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A new artificial intelligence model blindsided policymakers at meetings of the International Monetary Fund, raising fears of faster, more-sophisticated cyberattacks on the global financial system. But the same technology also is being touted by its builders as the most powerful defense banks could have. On this week’s episode of Trumponomics, host Stephanie Flanders and guests Michael Deng, geoeconomics technology analyst at Bloomberg Economics, and Bloomberg News reporter Laura Noonan break down why Mythos, Anthropic’s most powerful AI model, is sparking both panic and optimism in boardrooms and across governments—and what it means for the security of the global financial system.

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It’s now been one year since Donald Trump’s sweeping attempt at global tariffs, and the economic fallout has been more nuanced than either critics or supporters predicted. On this episode of the Trumponomics podcast, host Stephanie Flanders speaks with Anna Wong of Bloomberg Economics and Oren Cass of the conservative think tank American Compass about a US economy that, in many respects, has proven unexpectedly resilient. Growth hasn’t collapsed, inflation hasn’t spiked and the president’s April 2025 tariffs (most of which were struck down in February by the Supreme Court) generated substantial federal revenue. The debate now centers on whether it will make a difference when it comes to Trump’s stated goal: reviving US manufacturing.

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On this episode of Trumponomics, host Stephanie Flanders examines how the US-Israel war with Iran has choked one of the world’s most vital shipping routes and tested the foundations of global trade. With traffic through the Strait of Hormuz severely constrained and hundreds of vessels backed up, the disruption is pushing up energy prices and raising fresh concerns about the reliability of supply chains. Bloomberg Global Trade Editor Brendan Murray and Africa and Middle East Correspondent Peter Martin join to unpack the economic fallout and geopolitical stakes.

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