How's the economy doing? Inflation is up, but other than that GDP is growing; unemployment is down; consumption is high; investment is strong; corporate earnings are good; and businesses are growing. Here are the latest numbers for that:
About 80% of job gains come from expanding businesses. Ditto for job losses. The other 20% come from new startups and closing businesses.
I continue to jitter about the possible collapse of supply chains from China if COVID-19 gets out of control there, but hopefully that's just my little worry. Aside from that, the American economy continues to look pretty strong over both the medium and long term.
Corporate earnings are good. A little *too* good, in fact, given how we're all taking a hit from inflation. Did I say "all"? Of course I mean *consumers*. Corporations just pass the extra expense on to us, and add a little more for good measure: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/apr/27/inflation-corporate-america-increased-prices-profits.
Stocks have been down for months now.
There's no point in getting economics or business reporting from the Guardian.
The Guardian article is pretty good, and consistent with other reporting. Companies are raising prices because they can.
As for stock market...P/E has been high for a while. Recent price increases help, but still not enough to justify current stock prices. Small changes in interest rates leading to really big swings--means investors are jittery and know a correction is needed.
Of course Putin's war, covid in China, etc. and all externalities that will affect costs.
The stock market is not the economy and business reporting and economic reporting are not the same thing. The Wall Street Journal reports on business but is not necessarily very good about the economy. It's not that stocks are completely unrelated to the economy but it's a mistake to conflate the two.
What difference does it make if nobody knows? The vast majority of Americans hear over and over again about "skyrocketing" or "soaring" pump prices. Telling the TV watching public that unemployment is low and jobs would be "carrying water" for the government and thus not permitted in the Great Media Book of Rules. Besides, it's bad for business, advertisers want people angry.
Yes but prices are "skyrocketing." That is lived truth for most people. There's no point pretending it's not happening. And while the labor market looks great in items of employment, wages are stagnant at best.
Skyrocketing is overstating this. An 8.5 increase in prices in the past year is certainly not great but it's not skyrocketing if your wages are going up 6 percent and for the people at the bottom of the wage curve it's higher.
The only thing that's "skyrocketing" is the price of energy - mostly oil/gasoline - and that's clearly almost entirely a result of the war in Ukraine and resulting sanctions.
The thing is we hear non stop about inflation and prices going up and very very little about the many positives in our economy. If you watch TV news inflation is mentioned at a ratio of 10:1 to the mentions of the lowest unemployment in a very long time.
That BLS series posts data that ended two quarters ago. It's not going to tell you much about how the economy is doing right now or where it's going. Hmm. I wonder if John McCain was looking at the same series when he claimed in the middle of summer 2008 that the economy was fine?
Pay attention to fertilizer prices -- https://bityl.co/Bysd -- not just because it jumped 15% after the start of the Ukraine War, but that prices have been climbing significantly since last September. Prices for everything will be volatile for a while.
As for China's zero-COVID policy, remember that their inactivated virus vaccines were barely viable against the original strain, and useless against Omicron. They have trials underway for an Omicron-specific vaccine, but they're not going to be able to loosen their zero-COVID policy anytime soon, unless the next variant proves to be extremely mild.
Russian tv viewers told they're going to do die anyway,
https://www.newsweek.com/russian-state-tv-comforts-viewers-nuclear-war-we-all-die-someday-1701580
Yikes! Are they trying to make Tucker Carlson seem sane?
Whenever you point out to a social conservative how whatever they're doing is utterly corrupt or harmful or with the general purpose of destroying humanity and increasing suffering, the actual purpose of all their interests, they will often dismiss your point with, 'What's it to you, you're going to die anyway,' exactly as if they expect an obvious benefit from taking everyone and everything with them.
In fact they simply do not care to think about what they're doing and have no other response to any other circumstance, trying to stay one step ahead of the catastrophe they provoke while insisting to the gullible there is no catastrophe at all.
Or at least was growing? https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2022/04/28/economy/us-economy-first-quarter-gdp/index.html
I think this is mostly good news for Democrats. Sooner or later a reckoning with inflation was pretty likely to morph into recession. Midterms are probably going to be ugly, but, assuming the absence of elections nullification*, I like Biden's chances is the economy has resumed growth by the end of 2023 or early 2024.
*A big assumption, I know.
I'm guessing that if we had a Republican president, Kevin might be a little less enthusiastic about growing corporate profits and might mention that real wages are down.
What if real wages weren't down???