Boom. That’s the best one-word summary of the state of the American economy. Later this month or sometime in June the economy will be back to the size it was before the pandemic hit. By year end, it will have made up the growth lost during 2020 and be as large as if China had […]
President Biden appeared before a joint session of Congress last week to announce the largest expansion of the American government since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society in 1964-1965, and perhaps the largest ever redistribution of income, wealth and resources from richer – the top 1% – to poorer. The man who campaigned as a moderate is […]
It’s not easy to follow the trillions trail. Here is a road map. Six relief bills have pumped $5.3 newly created fiat money into the economy, equal to about 25% of GDP. The early tranches of this spending reflected a bipartisan view that something had to be done to relieve the distress caused by the […]
My weekly comment on America’s political economy, until now, has been delivered to you on the Constant Contact platform. Starting this week it is being delivered on the Substack platform instead. The format might change slightly but, for better or worse, the content will not. And it will remain available without charge. As always, I […]
American Democrats are haunted by a nightmare in which Joe Biden is the central figure. Faced with a collapse of the international financial system when he took office, President Obama handed his vice president, Joe Biden a poisoned chalice, an $831 billion stimulus package that Democrats believe proved too little, too late, to produce a […]
Joe Biden has presided over the most radical change in the nation’s political economy since Franklin Roosevelt’s’ New Deal. And done it in about half of FDR’s famous One Hundred Days. He has expanded the reach of government and the welfare state by as much as, or more than, Lyndon Baines Johnson’s “All the Way […]
C’mon down, y’all. If y’all are tired of waiting for your state to really open things up, come to Texas. “It is now time to open Texas 100 per cent,” announced governor Greg Abbott. Theaters, sports venues, bars and restaurants to operate at capacity. No masks required, but if you want to wear one, and […]
Copper prices are up 56% to a nine-year high, house prices 9.5%, freight rates 215%, soybeans 54% and lumber 117%, according to Jon Hilsenrath of the Wall Street Journal. The cost of feeding herds has jumped 30%, oil and other commodity prices are soaring and prices of used cars are up 17%. That’s not the […]
“Old soldiers never die, they just fade away,” General Douglas MacArthur told a joint session of congress seventy years go. Not true of old politicians, as Joe Biden has proved. Old soldiers often try to fight new wars with outdated methods developed in their long-ago battles. The risk for the American economy is that Biden […]
Just as it seemed the impeachment trial of Donald Trump would drag into this week, the impeachment managers decided that delaying the inevitable acquittal by calling witnesses was a bad idea, and settled for a deposition from a Republican congresswoman stating what she heard from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy what he said he had […]