Tag:Recession

Today’s September jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics is the last before the election. Despite having COVID-19, Donald Trump and his cohort...

While the ongoing pandemic-induced economic collapse has left the highest earners in the U.S. largely unscathed—or, in the case of some billionaires, even wealthier...

The economists of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the group that determines when recessions begin and end, have officially declared that we are...

The Department of Labor reported Thursday that yet another 2.1 million Americans, on a seasonally adjusted basis, applied for initial state unemployment benefits in the week...

Let me start with this. Although the devil is always in the details, especially when dealing with a felonious little succubus like Trump, I have no problem with the basic outlines of the stimulus package I saw today. For starters, more than half of the booty goes directly to the American people in the form of two separate stimulus payments directly to each adult. At least the split is on the up and up. I’d prefer non interest loans rather than flat out bail outs, but you can’t have everything in this world, I learned that a long time ago, when J Lo turned down my offer to go to bed. With all of the bad news we’ve had lately, I hate to be the bearer of more, but this stimulus package won’t work, for one simple reason. It doesn’t help matters that El Pendejo Presidente is an ignoramus, who sees every issue through a political lens, and whose every wish come true is the stock market. Nor does it help that his chief economic adviser doesn’t even have a friggin’ Masters degree in economics, or that his Treasury Secretary was one of the pirates that helped to engineer the financial crisis of 2008. All of that makes it harder to get good information, and to make intelligent decisions, but it isn’t the underlying reason for impending failure. Normally, a recession starts when the general population gets some kind of negative information that makes them queasy about their own personal future. And when that happens, they do a very basic thing, they stop spending money. If consumers stop spending money, businesses don’t need as many people to sell shit, and manufacturers don’t need as many people to make shit, and layoffs follow, inflation goes up on everyday items, and investors jump out of high windows. The idea behind a stimulus is that if you give people free money, whether through lower interest rates, lower payroll taxes or just plain handing out lucre, people will spend that extra money. And as long as they do, it provides businesses and manufacturers to adjust accordingly to the downturn, hopefully with minimal employment disruption. In essence, you use money to buy time to soften the blow. Administrations have been using one form of stimulus or another forever. But here’s the rub, and why it won’t work. At its core, this market swan dive is not a financial crisis, with the normal economic foundations and underpinnings. It is a national health crisis, and one that you can’t buy your way out of! Look, the entire objective of a financial stimulus is to quickly inject money back into the economy. Riddle me this, Riddler. How do you do that when everything is shut down, and the places that are open have nothing to sell?!? The ones that most desperately need the money are service places like retail stores, bars, and restaurants, and they’re all shut down! Munchkin Mnuchin can give every adult in the country $1000, but what do they do with it? There’s nothing that they can spend it on for starters. Even if they wanted to shop, greedy pigs have already snarfed up all of the Doritos, and made sure that the rest of us will be wiping our collective asses with cocktail napkins for the next six months. And since the vast majority […]

God, today must have burned Trump’s ass like a flamethrower. But I guess a guy can only stand there for so long with his thumb up his ass, while his own hand picked experts stand a foot away and tell the nation he’s full of shit, before he finally has to accept reality. Then throw in the fact that, despite his best economic genius, we may well be on the way to an economic recession almost as deadly as the coronavirus on his watch. Man! Even calling Hannity to bitch ain’t gonna take the sting out of this one. But with those admissions, no matter how much he gritted his teeth, the battlefield has just changed, and in a critical way. Trump admitted that there are actually two distinct crises, a humanitarian crisis brought on by the coronavirus, and an economic crisis, likely at least partially brought on by the coronavirus. And as everybody should know by now, when presented with human pain and suffering, and corporate losses, Trump and the GOP will jump on the economic fix first, every goddamn time. So far, there have been two emergency spending bills, and Speaker Pelosi is hell bent for leather for a third one. By necessity, the first two have been focused on the government’s response to the virus, and making resources available to combat it. The third package Pelosi is working on deals with things like extending unemployment back to 99 weeks, a moratorium on foreclosures and evictions, as well as interest payments on student debt, and even Mitt Romney is wandering around the Senate, trying to gin up support for an Andrew Yang style monthly government payment to every adult in the country. I hate to be a stick in the mud, but fuckin‘ fuggedaboudit! MSNBC reported earlier this afternoon that the US airlines are preparing to beg for a $50 billion bailout, and that;s just to start. Late last week in one of his press conferences, Trump floated (pun intended) a bail out package for cruise ship companies. and even earlier in the week, it was uttered that Trump was trying to find a way to put together a bail out package for his shitty resort properties. The Democrats, led by Bernie Sanders are arguing that, if tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions are going to be spent, it should be spent on people. Sanders wants to use some of that booty to provide every American with health insurance. There are calls for the government to make good the payments that small businesses miss on their mortgages and leases due to be shuttered by the virus. And there was talk about using some of the money to alleviate some of the crushing student loan debt in this country, and making sure that every American sidelined by the virus is fully compensated. All heady stuff, and all quite practical, but all heading in the wrong direction as far as El Pendejo Presidente and the GOP are concerned. They’ll wanna subsidize the oil industry because nobody is buying gas, they’ll want to pay Disney for keeping their overpriced theme parks closed, and McDonald’s because nobody is snarfing down on their thawed and fried burgers. And if Shelly Adelson has anything to say about it, they’ll want to compensate hotel/casinos for […]

While Donald Trump crows about the bull market and the strong economy being his personal enterprises, which he created and conducts with great brilliance, the actual reality has been going in a different direction for quite some time. In 2018 J.P. Morgan predicted that the next financial crisis would be in 2020. And this time last year the U.S. bond yield curve inverted, meaning that long-term debts had a lower yield than short-term. For the past fifty years this has been a red flag of impending recession. Usually, when the inverse yield happens, a recession occurs within eighteen months. Trump might have skated by until election day with his trade war idiocy and a number of other things, had he not botched the coronavirus response so thoroughly. However, he did and it looks like the chickens will be home to roost early. Translation: JPMorgan is now forecasting a US recession in 2020. https://t.co/Ic9qMd3hh6 — Heather Long (@byHeatherLong) March 12, 2020 And J.P. Morgan isn’t the only one. Trump’s former economic adviser says that we’re in a recession as well. Moody’s economist Mark Zandi agrees that recession is now underway: “the economy will contract very sharply in March” — John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) March 13, 2020 And it’s not like this is coming out of the woodwork. Maybe to Trump, because he’s a moron who surrounds himself with morons, but not to anybody who’s been watching the economy with even one eye. EVEN BEFORE CORONAVIRUS, A TRUMP RECESSION WAS COMING. HERE WERE THE ECONOMIC FACTS **BEFORE** COVID-19:Manufacturing=10yr low Trade deficit=worseEconomic growth=weak 2.1%Wages stuck to inflationMonthly job creation ⬇️ Farm bankruptcies⬆️Homelessness⬆️Deficit ⬆️ — Nigel St. Hubbins ???????? (@Nigel_StHubbins) March 13, 2020 I get the sense that this is not only the low point of the Trump presidency but the low point of the American presidency ever. Has any president ever been this overmatched by a crisis? — David Brooks (@nytdavidbrooks) March 13, 2020 Now, coming from David Brooks, who has been greasing the wheels for this occasion for the last 30 years, this is ironic, but nonetheless the point is valid. NPR: “Trump did not push to do aggressive testing because more testing might have led to more cases being discovered of the Coronavirus outbreak, and Trump made it clear the lower the numbers on Coronavirus, the better for the president and his re-election this fall.” https://t.co/4N9PDRmotT — Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) March 12, 2020 But here’s the bottom line. A quick reminder to every Republican senator not named @MittRomney that a few weeks ago, each and every one of you voted against removing Donald Trump from office. Every one of you knew he was unfit for office when you did this. Every one of you chose to risk today happening. — Benjamin Wittes (@benjaminwittes) March 12, 2020 What is happening in America right now is due to GOP complicity. Trump is their Frankenstein’s monster. However many people die from coronavirus in the United States, the blood will be on their hands. I hope that they sleep well knowing this.  

You know, there’s a good reason why The Pampers President always seems so calm, decisive, and self assured when acting as our President. For most men, no matter what their previous history, when they walk into the Oval Office for the first time, and sit down behind that desk, they realize that they now are the most important and powerful man in the entire free world, and that responsibility can be crushing. But Donald Juan Trump has spent his entire life as the most important and powerful man in the world, at least his world, and since no other world matters, what’s the sweat? Thank God that His Lowness is an economic savant, since he has the entire world economy to oversee. And that’s because, as the U.S. economy goes, so goes the world, right? And what is Trump’s grand economic master plan for the U.S.? Well, let’s see, he has Jamie Dimon predicting that every U.S. family is gonna blow an extra grand a year on necessities thanks to his trade war, he’s busy pretending that U.S. farmers are Stormy Daniels, and paying them off $18 billion to shut them up about his tariff effects, and he’s making U.S. consumers foot the bill for the Chinese to find out how good Mexican soy beans, Argentine beef, and Canadian seafood really is. Meanwhile, tariffs on imported steel and aluminum mean that the manufacturing sector is actually contracting instead of expanding. Iz genius I tells ya, iz genius! But as much as Trump may like to believe that the entire world revolves around his own, plump and overstuffed self, the truth is different. The world has become interconnected economically. Bill Clinton understood that when he negotiated NAFTA, and Barack Obama bloody well knew it when he negotiated the TPP, as a way to contain China in the Pacific rim. Not only can U.S. economic issues affect the global economy, so can global economic issues affect the U.S. economy. Right now, The $1 Store Caligula seems hell bent for leather to drive the US economy head first into a recession at 100 mph, but he isn’t the only thing that economists have to worry about. Right now, there’s this little kerfuffle going on in The United Kingdom. You might have heard of it, a little thing called Brexit, and it’s the biggest rage over there right now since the Beatles. A few years ago, Vlad the Imp took a fancy to the idea that a great way to demolish the European Union would be to have Great Britain suddenly pull up stakes and bail out of the EU the way that Trump bails out of Atlantic City casinos. He subliminally convinced a wacky white haired Brit with a Moe Howard haircut that this was the coolest idea since sliced bread, and the rest is history as it’s being written. The cherry on top was having the bowl topped dotard end up running the whole shebang, ensuring the maximum damage possible. The Brits who can count to twenty without removing their shoes and socks, and can remember to go inside when it rains are fighting BoJo tooth and nail. But the damage is already done. Even if Johnson and his pirates are made to walk the plank in the upcoming snap election, it is difficult […]