May 7, 2026

Macro-finance YouTube is melting down because presumptive Fed Chair Kevin Warsh did not explicitly reject the possibility of "financial repression" in his Senate hearings. The most bobbliest of the talking heads are claiming retail investors need to move their money by May 15th, when Powell's term as Fed chair ends. That's nuts, but concern (or just awareness) is warranted. Financial repression means holding interest rates below inflation so bondholders lose some purchasing power every year and the government's debt shrinks at the same rate. (Think: a restaurant that shrinks the by-the-glass pour while still selling full bottles.) It's how the U.S. retired its WWII debt; 106% of GDP in 1946, 23% by 1974. Carmen Reinhart and Belen Sbrancia laid out the playbook in The Liquidation of Government Debt, a 2015 IMF paper. Debt market trends suggest many believe Warsh — Morgan Stanley alum, Bilderberg attendee — is ready to call that audible.

Public and private debt are linked; when the government runs up a debt, the private sector usually has a surplus and vice versa. Historically, that private debt is held – or experienced as a decline in purchasing power – by those least able to push back. Repression hits savers with cash, bonds, and CDs while benefiting those with fixed-rate mortgages, business loans, and other long-dated debt — which is to say homeowners with big mortgages, leveraged real estate investors, private equity bros, and the debt-happy rich. The upper-middle class is the only group whose outcome depends on which side of the financial fence they sit on. Many of us sit precisely on said fence – uncomfortable, sure, but less so if we can just relax.

Last week David Letterman made headlines for calling the CBS executives axing The Late Show with Stephen Colbert “lying weasels” in the Times. Inflammatory, but not new. Letterman, who called CBS execs “pinheads” and “corporate weasels” when he still worked for them, is the current caretaker of a specific late-night lexicon –insults for corporate cowards – a role that has been passed down from host to host since February 11, 1960, when Jack Paar walked off Tonight after a suit censored a joke, telling the camera "there must be a better way of making a living." Paar’s quip set up a talent-versus-management dynamic that subsequent host mined, performing their independence while reflecting the resentments of their most valuable demo. Sometimes the animosity was real (in 1969 the Smothers Brothers sued CBS over their cancellation under congressional pressure) and sometimes it was kayfabe (Fallon gossiping about Lorne Michaels).

Anti-managements disses generally imply (or state) smallness, sneakiness, and stupidity. Conan O’Brien memorable went with “brainless sons of goats,” which is nice than Bill Hicks using “Satan’s little helpers.” Invariably, the implicit accusation is the same: These Brooks Brothers assholes prioritize marketing dollars over product. In the 1970s, that critique applied mostly to creative fields. Now it applies to most large American tech and tech-adjacent companies, which run ad and consumer businesses simultaneously and have spent the decade enshittifying — serving their audiences to marketers instead of serving consumers. Letterman's critique, an echo of insults lobbed at William Paley's henchmen back in the day, isn't new. It just resonates because more and more of us encounter weasels in the wild.

Like Chuck-E-Cheese tickets, a college diploma use to be redeemable for prizes. For sixty years, a degree more-or-less guaranteed non-fuck ups professional status and stability. Then, around 2008, something ruptured. In Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class, Noam Scheiber, a labor reporter for the Times, walks the length of the college-to-barista-to-agitator pipeline, following labor organizers who had, at one time, expected to be management.

The book extends grace to its subjects in a way many commentators haven't and tracks not just compelling subjects, but what happens when the well-educated start seeing themselves as workers rather than proto-professionals. A specific worldview. A wan smile behind the counter.

Upper Middle spoke to Scheiber about Starbucks, underdogism, and AOC as the standard bearer for the temporarily aimless.

The title of the book makes a claim — that there's a "college-educated working class." Is there?
Class is mostly material. People who graduated from college in the late 1990s — even if they worked at Starbucks for a few years — thought of themselves as future managers. And if they didn't do well, the onus was on them. By the second half of the 2010s, white-collar workers started seeing themselves purely as workers. During the 2023 auto worker strikes, 76% of college grads supported the UAW. That was new. It was a swing in public sentiment.

The people in your book share something that's not quite a philosophy. More of a worldview. How do you describe it?
It's broader than economics. I call it identification with the underdog — whether it's someone taking shit from a manager or people in Gaza being bombed by the Israelis. It's ideological. It's also more effective than you might think.

If you're a political party, your job is to win the median voter. If you're the labor movement, you're at 10% and going to 15% is a wild success. When the Starbucks union posted about solidarity with Gaza, even the SEIU workers sympathetic to Palestinians were, I think, wondering why. They union took it down. But I think you can argue that it actually worked. It energize and excited a small percentage of people.

At Apple, the union won real concessions. Some organizers were pleased, others disenchanted. Why?
Kevin Gallagher, the most ideological of the Apple retail union ringleaders I spoke to, goes to DSA meetings. He's an ideological creature of the left. So I expected him to be disappointed when Apple offered a raise of 1.5% a year over three years – the same or less than non-union stores – but he was actually relatively high on the deal. His view was, 'We got a few concrete things, now it's on us to show our coworkers why a union is in their self-interest.' On the other hand, Kaya Barrett — incredibly bright, well-read, but not in the mix of left politics – was concerned Apple had just coopted ideas and were engaged, essentially, in labor-washing.

The radicals were more pragmatic. I didn't anticipate that.



How has labor's theory of its own power changed?
Labor used to think of its power as the power to withhold labor. After Reagan and the air traffic controllers in '81, striking became less potent. By the '90s, with the rise of the service and public-sector unions, labor pivoted to strategic communications. A strike in 1965 could shut down a few plants and the employer would cave because the supply chain stopped. Now, strikes rely on shaming a company in public. The press is a much more central player and those of us who cover labor have to be aware of what's real and what's PR.

There's another term for these kinds of people: embarrassed elites. The history of embarrassed elites is written in blood — they revolt more readily than the poor, who are busy scraping by. Do you see your subjects' pushback ceasing to be nonviolent?
It's empirically true that we've had an uptick in political violence over the past ten years. Robert Pape at the University of Chicago has shown that 10% on either side now tolerate or support political violence. What comes through in Pape's research is that it isn't desperate people doing this. It's people who fear downward mobility. The reaction to Luigi Mangione would have been shocking twenty years ago. The tails of the distribution have fattened. We aren't on the verge of violent revolution, but we'll see more political violence and some of the people committing it will be from this class.

The people in your book want to throw off their shackles, but they show no impulse toward entrepreneurship. Why?
Entrepreneurship has gotten a bad name, partly because of the gig economy — a sense that tech got big by pushing risk onto individual people. Also, 2008 left people with real risk aversion — an emotional yearning for stability — and entrepreneurship is inherently unstable. Also, ideologically, being a tech founder was a high-status calling until about 2015. Then Cambridge Analytica, Travis Kalanick, Elizabeth Holmes — the founder goes from heroic to a tear in the social fabric.

The 40-under-40-to-prison pipeline.
Exactly. The whole dream is tainted.

Graham Platner is running for Senate in Maine on oyster-farmer-and-Marine bona fides — but he went to GW. Will more candidates pitch themselves as college-educated working class?
Yes. AOC is the canonical example. In an earlier generation, scrambling from job to job after college — bartending, waitressing, a nonprofit gig that didn't take — would have been a source of shame. By 2018, it was a condemnation of the system. AOC gave voice to that. Mamdani went to Bowdoin, then bounced around and flirted with being a rapper. Exit polls show that 84% of college grads under 30 voted for Mamdani. The idea that 84% of anyone will do the same thing is shocking. So, yes, I think the college-educated working class will be a political fixture.