Former Trump Bureau of Labor Statistics nominee on price increases since the Iran war started: “The Producer Price Index came in red hot, it's not good, there's no way to sugarcoat this”
EJ Antoni: “At this point, all of the knock-on effects of the Iran war are simply overpowering”
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Citation
From the June 11, 2026, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room
STEVE BANNON (HOST): I want to go back to the numbers today, and I want to set the predicate that there's no bigger supporter of President Trump and his program than EJ Antoni. You were gonna be the nominee for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which I still think has to get done, but I digress, you were — you're very close to Scott Bessent, the Secretary of the Treasury, and Alexandra Preate and the entire team over at Treasury. You've been a pretty good surrogate for the Treasury program because you believed in President Trump's economic program and you believe Scott Bessent was a great Secretary of Treasury with a safe pair of hands to do this. And, lo and behold, guess what? It was working. We would have you on here and it's working. You see jobs are coming back and you're seeing growth, all of it.
Now — and President Trump's got his strategic reasons for doing this war about the nuclear weapons, but the reality is in the math, and I want to get down to the math. What was the print today? How did that tie to yesterday? And where do you think we are in the good old EJ Antoni give it to us with the bark on assessment of where we are right now, sir?
EJ ANTONI (GUEST): Well, look, the Producer Price Index came in red hot, it's not good, there's no way to sugarcoat this, right? It was — prices rose 1.1% just in the month of May, and that's on top of another 1.1% increase in the month of April.
So if you annualize this, in other words, if you take those price increases and you say what happens if we have that for an entire year, that's what an annualized rate is, that's where you get into double digits, it's over 13%, it's almost 14%. And if you take the 3 months that we now have data for since the Iran war starts, so March, April, and May, what you see there is again an annualized rate that is in the double digits.
It is just red hot. We're seeing, not just the annualized rate, but the year-over-year increase. In other words, go from May of '25 to May of '26, what's happened with prices, and they're up at the fastest rate since the Biden administration. So again, not good news here.
And essentially, Steve, what's happening — because a lot of people said, oh, it's just oil. Right? It's just oil prices. Everything else is doing just fine.
You know, in in previous oil crises, I think that's what you would have seen. But as time has gone on, and I think this has to do with the speed at which information now travels and the speed at which price signals move throughout the economy and throughout supply chains. As time has gone on, you can track this through different oil crises going back to the 70s to today. The rate at which oil prices bleed over to the rest of the economy has sped up pretty dramatically. And by the way, this is not just on the way up. This is on the way down too. How many times in 2025, Steve, did you and I talk about the fact that lower oil prices as a result of this president's policies were driving down inflation throughout the broader economy. Well, now it's just having exactly the opposite effect. As oil has gone higher, it is pushing up prices throughout the economy. And we're seeing this if you look at all of the different metrics that try to take out outliers essentially from our inflation metrics.
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At this point, all of the knock-on effects of the Iran war are simply overpowering. This is a headwind that is overpowering all of the tailwinds that this administration has produced, a lot of which, again, have come from the great folks at Treasury. All all all those, those tailwinds, I mean, have come from the Treasury department.