Another Republican President, Another Recession.

hanimmal

hanimmal

Well-Known Member
I don't have a crystal ball or anything, and Russia crushing the global economy with Putin's temper tantrum in Ukraine after losing his favorite political puppets in the last few elections is not good for our economy. But, for real anything Deutsch Bank says after the shit it has pulled makes me question their motives for crying 'recession'.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. economy faces plenty of threats: War in Ukraine, high grocery bills, spiking gasoline prices, splintered supply chains, the lingering pandemic and rising interest rates that slow growth.

The Biden White House is betting the U.S. economy is strong enough to withstand these threats, but there are growing fears of a coming economic slump among voters and some Wall Street analysts.

The next few months will test whether President Joe Biden built a durable recovery full of jobs with last year’s $1.9 trillion relief package, or an economy overfed by government aid that could tip into a downturn. On the line for Democrats ahead of the midterm elections is whether voters see firsthand in their lives that inflation can be tamed and the economy can manage to run hot without overheating.

Brian Deese, director of the White House National Economic Council, told reporters this week that the 3.6% unemployment rate and last year’s robust growth puts the U.S. in a safe place compared to the rest of the world.

“The core question is whether the strength of the US economy is now an asset or a liability,” Deese said. “What we have done over the course of the last 15 months is driven a uniquely strong economic recovery in the United States, which positions us uniquely well to deal with the challenges ahead.”

But others see an economy that could struggle to preserve growth while reducing inflation now running at a 40-year high of 7.9%. The Federal Reserve has signaled a series of benchmark interest rate increases and other policies to slow inflation this year, yet Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has destabilized the global energy and food markets in ways that could push prices upward.

Deutsche Bank on Tuesday became the first major financial institution to forecast a U.S. recession. And Harvard University economist Larry Summers — a Democrat and former treasury secretary — noted that the U.S. economy has gone into recession within two years each time inflation eclipsed 4% and unemployment was below 5% as they are now.

Joe LaVorgna, who worked in the Trump White House and is now chief economist for the Americas at Natixis, said he expects economic growth this year to be just below 1%, a potentially dangerous level.

While household balance sheets are solid and unemployment low, wages are not keeping up with inflation, which could dampen consumer spending. And supply chain disruptions and higher energy costs will be additional drags.

“The reason why you have a recession when the economy is growing 1% is it’s like a weakened immune system,” LaVorgna said. “Any negative event, even a small one, is going to throw you off course and stall speed becomes a recession.”

Still, because of the strong labor market and household savings, LaVorgna also anticipates that any downturn would be mild.

So far, consumer spending has been healthy even if the public views the economy as anemic.

Nearly 7 in 10 Americans believe the economy is in poor shape, according to a poll last month by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Yet Bank of America noted that total debit and credit card spending in March was up 11%from a year ago, and its analysts concluded households are “strong enough to weather the storm provided it doesn’t persist too long.”

There are also signs that consumers are adjusting as higher oil prices have led average gasoline costs to hit $4.15 a gallon, according to AAA. Gas costs have fallen in the past week, but they’re still up 45% from a year ago.

One consequence of higher prices is that Americans began to use less oil and gas. The U.S. consumed a daily average of 21.9 million barrels during the first full week of February; the figure fell 9% to 19.9 million barrels during the first week of April, according to the Energy Information Administration. That decline is larger than the normal seasonal drop-off in 2019, the last full year before the pandemic. Gasoline usage has dropped more than 6% during the same period.

A recent Goldman Sachs research note stood out to Biden administration officials because it suggested that job growth and pay increases would cushion the economy from higher commodity prices. Because of the strong labor market, the economy is better protected from commodity shocks than in the recessions of 1974, 1980 and 1990, as well as the 2008 financial crisis.

The White House has watched with some frustration as the public conversation about the economy has been reduced to inflation, believing that largely ignores the strength of the labor market and the idea that families are able to manage the higher prices because of the coronavirus relief provided earlier.

The administration believes that Fed rate increases as well as a drop in deficit spending this year will help to lower inflation. But the key message that the White House wants to deliver in response to public fears about the economy is that Biden understands their concerns.

The challenge, however, is that many Americans are so focused on inflation that they believe the job market — and wider economy — is weaker than it actually is. That means the White House has to make a nuanced case in which it recognizes the economic weaknesses but repeats the low unemployment rate again, again and again so that it lodges in the public mind.

The doubts about the economy — despite the solid jobs numbers — are “a signal that we need to continue to make that case clearly and unambiguously,” said Deese.
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cannabineer

cannabineer

Ursus marijanus
hanimmal said:
I don't have a crystal ball or anything, and Russia crushing the global economy with Putin's temper tantrum in Ukraine after losing his favorite political puppets in the last few elections is not good for our economy. But, for real anything Deutsch Bank says after the shit it has pulled makes me question their motives for crying 'recession'.

https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-biden-business-inflation-brian-deese-1bdd2c2215ec6d430ffcf1ecc218c237View attachment 5115169
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Judging by that faint clink when I walk into something, I am beginning to suspect that one of mine are.
 
hanimmal

hanimmal

Well-Known Member
https://www.rawstory.com/the-jobs-market-favors-workers-for-the-first-time-in-a-half-century-no-one-in-the-press-corps-can-hear-it/Screen Shot 2022-04-09 at 2.14.00 PM.png
It’s easy to forget how dire the job market was – and just about everything was – during the last year of the Trump presidency.

Americans were forced to consider theft and murder to make sure their families had enough toilet paper amid a once-a-century plague that will, by the time it’s over, have killed more than a million of us.

I guess we’re just supposed to pretend that never happened, like a fresh hell of a sermon interrupted by the sudden toot of a pastor’s fart – or Donald Trumps’ trademarks in China – or Michael Avenatti.

But letting the memory of the wreckage left behind by Republican presidents is why we get so many more Republican presidents.

So prepare for a haunting flashback.

Before 2020, America had never seen more than a million weekly unemployment claims, not even during the Great Recession.

Late in March 2020, nearly 3 million workers filed claims.

In a week.

That was followed by 5.9 million, then 6.1 million. Pretty much the populations of Los Angeles and Chicago combined were out of work.

In a week.

That weekly hemorrhaging didn’t drop below a million until last August. It didn’t hit pre-pandemic levels until last October.

The American Rescue Plan – along with various pandemic-related reprieves – built on previous and considerable efforts to soften the pain of the pandemic by putting money into workers’ pockets.

The result of this sort of bottom-up economics?

An explosion of job growth unlike any seen before.

We are now seeing the lowest unemployment claims in more than 50 years. 2021 was literally the best year of job growth ever recorded.

You’d think that’d be big news.

Sure, if the president were Republican.

Look, it’s easy to pretend this remarkable recovery, which has seen all jobs lost regained six years faster than it took the job market to recover from the Great Recession, was inevitable or predictable.

It wasn’t.

“Pre-Rescue Act, CBO projected the unemployment rate would be 5.1 percent this past quarter, not go below 4 percent until 2026, and would never go below 3.9 percent. In fact, it fell to 3.6 percent in March,” Seth Hanlon, a former special assistant to President Obama for economic policy, noted.

You may not be aware of the good news.

You’re not alone.

A recent poll found only 12 percent of Americans knew we’d just experienced the best year of job growth ever. In comparison, 43 percent of our fellow citizens believe in the existence of demons.

What explains this catastrophic cognitive dissonance?

Some of it is complicated.

Much of the good news has been buried in constant positive revisions by the government of job numbers. That process dulled deadlines.

It’s also hard to celebrate the good news during a pandemic that’s still killing the unvaccinated, immunocompromised and the unlucky.

(And anyway, work sucks.)

But the simple reason for Americans not knowing how effective the American Rescue Plan has been is psychological abuse.

The Washington press corps, warped by the influence of rightwing media, tends to ignore good job news under Democratic presidencies.

Consider this: Do you know more jobs were created in 2014, the year Obamacare went into effect, than any year so far in the century before 2021? That’s after five years of Republicans predicting the opposite?

What’s going on now is more nefarious, though, It comes from people who know better. They understand well this newfound labor power.

It’s Corporate America.

That’s why workers having the best job security in their lives is continually framed not as victory for Joe Sixpack, but as a crisis.

"US businesses are not laying off workers because they know the enormous challenges they're facing in filling open positions," Ryan Sweet, of Moody's Analytics, told Reuters. "If initial claims remain below 200,000 for a period of time, it will raise a red flag with the Fed."

Not enough layoffs should raise a red flag?

Is the job market too good?

(How dare you ask for a raise! I should be on my superyacht!)

These Scrooge-before-Ghosts-Scared-Him headlines are more common than headlines about the balance of power shifting toward the interests of labor. An excellent example of this comes courtesy of Axios: “Worker shortage thwarts Biden’s ‘millions’ of jobs pledge.”

More nefarious, however, is the fixation by the press corps on the allegation that “inflation” is driven by workers' newfound advantages.

For Republicans, the advantages of discounting the best job market for workers in half a century are obvious. They need to justify resuming power. For Corporate America, record profits are not enough.

They are acutely aware of the success of unionizing efforts at an Amazon warehouse and at multiple Starbucks’ locations. They see how hard it is to hire when workers don’t live in terror of unemployment.

They see Democratic majorities in the Congress having the power, though not yet the votes, to clawback some of the massive giveaways corporations racked up during the Trump administration.

And they want their layoffs back.

Unfortunately, the press corps is happy to help.

So is the Fed – with rate increases likely to deflate the jobs market than help mitigate inflation, which has as much to do with the pandemic and the flimsiness of anti-worker supply chains as anything.

Workers haven’t had much to celebrate for a long time. It’s hard to celebrate an economy fundamentally rigged to fluff the super rich.

But we better understand the power we have.

Corporations want it back, fast.
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DIY-HP-LED

DIY-HP-LED

Well-Known Member
hanimmal said:
I don't have a crystal ball or anything, and Russia crushing the global economy with Putin's temper tantrum in Ukraine after losing his favorite political puppets in the last few elections is not good for our economy. But, for real anything Deutsch Bank says after the shit it has pulled makes me question their motives for crying 'recession'.

https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-biden-business-inflation-brian-deese-1bdd2c2215ec6d430ffcf1ecc218c237View attachment 5115169
Click to expand...
A roaring economy and low unemployment mean nothing to these assholes when the dog whistle blows. Remember these people are actively trying to screw themselves, as long as you get screwed too.
 
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