Question: How do you know you are gullible?
Answer: If you believe anything on Fox News constitutes journalism then you are sharp as a butter knife and will believe anything. The National Enquirer has higher journalism standards than Fox.
One fact checking investigation found 60% of Fox News statements to be either false or an outright lie. Thankfully there have been even more fact checking investigations and the news doesn’t get any better for Fox. You can read the PDF of another here.
What Trump has done to agriculture with his trade war is knocking over the same economic dominoes Jimmy Carter’s Russian Grain Embargo knocked over and he keeps pouring gas on the fire.
The U.S. equivalent of North Korean State Run Media (Fox) has been touting the stock market numbers. It’s easy to juice the numbers. You give basically “free” money to investors and they buy. That’s what happened to juice the numbers. The stock market is irrelevant to the average working stiff because they don’t get put-food-on-the-table money from it.
Despite all of the promises and outright lies told to sell a middle and lower class ass-raping as the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” that repatriated money didn’t go to worker’s wages. It went to executive bonuses, cash reserves and stock buybacks, many of which probably timed so that executive stock bonuses could be sold for much much more.
Our current stock market is dramatically inflated by the direct manipulation of “free” money and stock buybacks. Lots of analysts are starting to come right out and say the numbers being reported do not justify the stock price. You know it’s obvious when even Yahoo Finance reports on the slowing U.S. growth. We are basically back to Irrational Exuberance.
The stock market is not the economy.
Heads of big companies are publicly agreeing with this given their actions. All or mostly stock merger/acquisition deals between companies happen when the leaders of the purchasing or merger initiating company believe their stock is currently overpriced. It’s buying power they may never have again so they use it. You can learn more about it clicking this link. Discussion of the all stock deals starts around the eight minute mark. You should keep listening through the “Your Economy” segment.
Even a Nobel Laureate economics professor at Yale University sees what I do though he sees it from the abstract number side.
Last time I talked about how the Ag industry first, followed by the automotive industry, shoved the downward death spiral into overdrive. Many of you came sputtering back in private communications trying to regurgitate Fox propaganda.
Just how short are your memories?
It appears many Americans really do have attention spans no longer than a Tweet.
In January 2019 GM laid off 4,000 workers. Many economists put the ripple effect at 16,000 actual jobs. When February 2019 happened it turned out GM laid off 14,000. These are the ones GM laid off directly. The indirect layoffs will be roughly triple, especially if the workers have to relocate. Indirect layoffs are the supporting jobs: waitresses, gas station attendants, auto mechanics and even teachers if more than a thousand families move out of a school district in a few short months.
By November 1, 2019 we learned manufacturing had its third straight month of contraction due in large part to the trade war. Contraction ultimately means hours and/or workers are being cut as production is either slowed or idled. Hopefully you click the above link and listen to the entire episode as they define a recession and explain why so many people look at the jobs report.
By November 6, 2019 we learned we’ve had the biggest worker productivity drop in 4 years. Some of that drop is attributed to the fact companies are not investing in equipment and technology. While that is certainly true, the larger truth is much of this drop is due to workers being under employed.
Many, if not all of GM’s 14,000 will either be unemployed or under employed. They aren’t going to get another job which paid what they made at GM. Some will hold out hope riding the unemployment benefits as long as possible. (A feat which becomes difficult over the holidays.) Others will be stocking shelves at Walmart for minimum wage then clocking in for a waitress or cook job because they now have to work 2+ jobs to pay the mortgage.
The same thing was true of the IT workers Disney replaced with Indian foreign nationals, forcing the workers to train their replacements. Every layoff of any size creates unemployed workers who then become underemployed for a span of time or are forced into early retirement.
Yes, we have some stories about how recession fears may be receding, but the people who really look at it aren’t certain. Everybody was freaked by the inverted yield curve which tells you a recession is coming.
Here’s a really good article about the business leader actions I spoke of earlier. For those of you who can’t bother to click and read, I will post this screenshot of its very pertinent content.
The ass-raping the middle and lower classes got with “The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” have propelled income inequality to its most extreme level in history. Consumers cannot keep buying when they don’t have any money. They can’t prop up the economy.
Let’s not forget the fact we have a two year old, Trump, worst president in the history of America in the White House. Guess what is going to happen? On November 21, many federal agencies run out of funding. The Twitter temper tantrum child will shutdown the government rather than fund anything which allows his impeachment followed by criminal prosecution to continue. After the election the impeachment won’t matter because he won’t be in office.
Over the past 4 weeks or so there have been many reports with economists holding Nobel prizes or heading up economics departments at respected institutions agreeing with me on this for their own reasons, though some of our reasons overlap. Most are working with the abstract data economists have to work with. I didn’t want to spend the time of going back through that many podcasts from marketplace.org and BBC World News just to find the half dozen links to podcasts you won’t listen to for an article you aren’t paying for, so feel free to spend your time there. Marketplace.org is good and carried on better NPR stations.
Don’t forget this isn’t just a trade war with China. Our Duffus in Chief has tarifs on the EU too.
The Trump Recession has started. There is no way of avoiding it now. Nearly two thirds of top executives and business owners say they expect a recession and they have been making financial plans accordingly.