Trump’s handling of the economy

Unemployment is high, 137K have died in the past four months from the virus, yet the stock market is @ almost $27K. What’s wrong with this picture?

Something happened on the road to globalization.

http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-07/18/c_139221047.htm

July 18, 2020

U.S. GDP in Q2 to contract by annualized rate of 37 pct: IMF staff
“The economic costs of the crisis are being borne disproportionately by the poor and vulnerable, bringing into stark relief deep inequities that have long afflicted the U.S.,” say the IMF staff.

WASHINGTON — U.S. output is expected to contract by an annualized rate of 37 percent in the second quarter and by 6.6 percent for 2020 as a whole, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) staff said on Friday, * after concluding an annual Article IV review of the U.S. economy.

The longest economic expansion in U.S. history has been derailed by the unanticipated advent of COVID-19, with the poorest households facing “particularly precarious prospects,” according to the concluding statement, which describes the preliminary findings of IMF staff at the end of an official staff visit.

“The economic costs of the crisis are being borne disproportionately by the poor and vulnerable, bringing into stark relief deep inequities that have long afflicted the U.S.,” the IMF staff said.

“The pandemic has also underscored some of the structural shortcomings of the U.S. health system whereby the provision of healthcare is fragmented, decentralized, predominantly employer-based, at high cost, and with a significant share of low-income households lacking coverage,” they continued.

* https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2020/07/17/mcs-071720-united-states-of-america-staff-concluding-statement-of-the-2020-article-iv-mission

lol, debt based ponzi’s ponzi. The rentier’s on wall street and retail investors are the problem. That is why its time to liquidate. Let the “free market” reign and withdrawal government support to the economy. It will collapse like a rock. The economy is all Bernie Madoff now.

The industrial revolution/science gave people the impression capitalism worked with little government support………….it was just the absolute number of new products merchants were peddling with this science that kept it going on. 1929 was the end game of that. The low hanging fruit is gone.

Ah, I can see it now. Supply lines at Wal Mart. Food shortages, ……….even the 1976 Soviet Union would grimace.

Robert Kuttner:

“I put the question to some leading pollsters and strategists. One person whom I greatly respect told me that in focus groups several people volunteered that they credited Trump personally for the supplemental unemployment checks and one-time $1,200 relief payments because his name was on the checks.

We all laughed when Trump made this happen. Well, the man may be certifiably insane in several respects, but he is also crazy like a fox.

And his desire to get vivid relief to ordinary working people is also behind Trump’s demand for a suspension of Social Security payroll taxes. (Let’s see if he tries to get his name on the rebates.)

Needless to say, the fact that folks fall for this ploy does not exactly speak well of the American people. As H.L. Mencken famously observed, no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public. (The actual quote was somewhat more convoluted, but you get the idea.)

All of this reminds me of a remarkable book written in 1857, which I know about only thanks to Sidney Blumenthal’s superb new work on the run-up to the Civil War, All the Powers of Earth. The earlier book, The Impending Crisis of the South, by the abolitionist Hinton Rowan Helper, was the first to make the point that poor, non-slaveholding whites, outnumbering slaveholders by more than five to one, were victimized by slavery almost as much as Blacks. “Never were the poorer classes of a people,” Helper wrote, “so basely duped, so adroitly swindled …”

Does this ring a distant bell? The duped poor whites of slavery days, who supported wealthy slaveholders because downtrodden whites at least felt superior to Blacks, were the direct ancestors of those duped souls who believe today that Black lives don’t matter, and who support Trump’s economic leadership because his name is on relief checks.

Jesus wept! God save this Republic.”

Name on the checks.

Only a solid trumpist could possibly say this mattered to them.

Absurd.

Ignore it.

For the past forty years, the rule has been, when there is nothing to invest in, buy stocks. I retired comfortably on that almost thirty years ago. In the 1950s and 1960s, business magazines published regional income statistics to help businesses direct investment. By the 1970s, that was gone. Business was on another track and most Americans disengaged from the “economy” by the 1980s.

The Republicans have worked hard to be seen as the party of business, but as anyone looking at the numbers could tell, the blue states with anti-business economies were economically better off for both businesses and consumers. As any scam artist, pick pocket or prestidigitator could tell you, what you say to people overrides what they experience. If you rob them blind and tell them you are making them rich, they’ll swear their empty wallet has more money in it than before they were robbed.