Messages from the WSJ July Survey:
Source: July WSJ survey.
Source: July WSJ survey.
Source: July WSJ survey.
Also, destroying the Fed and the world trading order.
Messages from the WSJ July Survey:
Source: July WSJ survey.
Source: July WSJ survey.
Source: July WSJ survey.
Also, destroying the Fed and the world trading order.
is he making the USA higher again?
donald trump will create chaos in the us economy. if you want 10% inflation and soaring deficits, just vote for the financially incompetent trump. last time he was in office, he created record high unemployment and a stock market that cratered 30%. the economy entered a the most dramatic recession ever. and he led a response to the covid pandemic that resulted in millions of deaths and a shuttering of the us economy. now he has experience. imagine how much worse he will make the world in a second attempt. a convicted felon with a record of sexual abuse, bankruptcy and unfaithfulness. no real christian would even consider voting for this con man.
Much though I dislike the man on all sorts of levels, this is unfair. “He created record-high unemployment?” Not hardly, the pandemic created high, but not record high, unemployment, and there wasn’t really much he could do about that. Unemployment actually declined steadily through his term until the pandemic: https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-unemployment-rate.htm. Stock market cratered 30%? https://www.macrotrends.net/2324/sp-500-historical-chart-data would beg to differ. The S&P 500 was at about 3050 when he entered office and about 4450 when he left. “Most dramatic recession ever?” 2007 is on hold on the other line, sir. And let’s not forget Operation Warp Speed, which helped give us Covid vaccines in an amazingly short time.
I’m not saying I think the Project 2025 + Trump policies are going to do anything but harm, but let’s get our facts straight.
S&P on 2/9/20 closed 3380, on 3/15/20 closed 2304. Drop of 1076 points. That is a 31.8% drop.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE
That 14.8% unemployment rate is by far the highest since WWII. April 2020.
These are facts sir. FACTS.
millions died at home and abroad because he led an effort to minimize the seriousness of the pandemic-for political purposes. drink bleach and take horse pills.
operation warp speed succeeded in spite of trump. he had no plans to get shots in arms when he left office. no plan at all. thank the scientists and companies who did the work-not trump. and thank biden for actually getting shots in people. a life saver.
ithaqua, you need to get your facts straight. the harm of a second term will be GREATER than what he was able to “accomplish” in term one. you are showing how a con man gets away with crap. don’t minimize his failures because you feel sorry for the old geezer. yes, and old geezer with a memory and comprehension problems.
Wow, a shutdown caused by a pandemic caused a brief large drop in the stock market, from which it recovered and then some, and you blame the drop on Trump. Maybe the 1918 Influenza pandemic was Woodrow Wilson’s fault too. Trump Derangement Syndrome, anyone?
In the middle of 2022, a year and a half after Trump left office, the CDC estimated about 1.1 M deaths in the U.S. It isn’t even remotely sensible to blame all of those on Trump.
Operation Warp Speed only existed *because* of Trump. Yes, he did stupid things, and made the pandemic worse than it had to be… but there is plenty of stupidity in the U.S., and in other countries too… and vaccine skepticism was something that’s existed here for decades. He followed, not started, the anti-vax movement. Blaming him for it is simply ridiculous. We had one of the best responses of any country in the world, when all is said and done.
Stop cherry-picking and wildly exaggerating facts. Sure, the harm of a second term will be > than the first, but you don’t need to make a bunch of stuff up in order to support that thesis.
“Maybe the 1918 Influenza pandemic was Woodrow Wilson’s fault”. I can make this case.
“Operation Warp Speed only existed *because* of Trump.” Seriously? Trump may have coined this cute term but the research had been going on for many years.
Look – you are normally a sensible person. Please drop this strange obsession with making Trump look competent. He wasn’t.
I am not cherry picking anything. What i said was factual. You are trying to revise history. Donald trump presided over a 31% collapse in the stock market, and the highest unemployment since world war 2. These facts are undeniable. Perhaps inconvenient, uncomfortable, but undeniable. And trump is capable of much worse. He is irresponsible and untrustworthy. Convicted felon, committer of sexual assault, bankrupt (both morally and financially), immoral and corrupt. These are all facts not in dispute about donald trump. Stop defending the con man.
“millions died at home and abroad because he led an effort to minimize the seriousness of the pandemic-for political purposes. drink bleach and take horse pills.”
That’s the key point here. All the damage Covid did to the economy was the result of his incompetence dealing with Covid.
Ithaqua I think you make a fair point. No one would ever accuse me of being a Trump fan, but I don’t think it’s entirely fair to focus on the pandemic months. That said, if you compare average real GDP growth over the first 12 quarter under Trump (i.e., from his inauguration up to the pandemic), the average growth in real GDP is 2.8 percent. Looking at the first 12 quarters under Biden it’s been slightly higher at 2.9%. And that includes the pandemic hangover months that Biden had to deal with in 2021. And the unemployment rate under Trump averaged 5% from Feb 2017 thru Jan 2020; i.e., from his first full month in power right up until the pandemic exploded. So those are Trump’s good months. Looking at Biden from Feb 2021 (his first full month in power) until June 2024 it averaged a significantly lower 4.1%. So once again Biden did better.
The one area where Trump did have a better record was with inflation; however, inflation is the responsibility of the Fed (not the President) and the Fed had to navigate the recovery from the various fiscal and exogenous supply shocks. On the whole the Fed has done a pretty good job of keeping the economy out of recession while putting inflation on a downward glidepath. Compared to the rest of the developed world we look pretty good.
As to COVID, Trump does deserve some credit for Operation Warp Speed even though he didn’t do much other than ensure that he made it an up and running project and selected a pretty competent 4-star general to head it up. I should point out that GEN Perna was my former boss (actually he was my boss two different times), so I’m prone to a somewhat biased view. Of course, Trump’s other actions around COVID were not helpful, to say the least. Injecting bleach? Not wearing a mask? Peddling lies about hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin? I could give Trump a pass for some of his missteps in the first few weeks of the pandemic, but he went off the rails pretty soon thereafter.
“but I don’t think it’s entirely fair to focus on the pandemic months.”
since I like you, 2slugs, and you typically provide honest and insightful thoughts on this blog, I will not respond cruelly here. but we elect a president to provide leadership in exactly the “pandemic months” that we faced. any monkey can sit back and ride the coattails of a smoothly running economy (thank you president Obama). but when the sh!t hits the fan, I want somebody who makes decisions to mitigate the problem, not make it worse. just imagine the outcome when trump needs to take action directly related to a possible nuclear war. can you visualize that carnage? trump had his “pandemic moment”, and he failed spectacularly. I am in no mood to give such a failed con man a “pass”. leadership at all times is a requirement for potus. from that perspective, trump was a spectacular failure. and I will guarantee you a worse outcome the next time the unhinged con man gets the opportunity to be in the Oval Office, although we really should be focusing on how president vance will operate in those circumstances.
baffling I hope I didn’t give you the impression that I meant to give Trump a pass for his handling of the pandemic. To be clear, I think he deserves some small bit of credit for picking a team and getting the funding that got Operation Warp Speed up-and-running in an amazingly short time. He doesn’t deserve sole credit, but at the very least he didn’t get in the way of developing and deploying several different vaccine candidates. At the very, very beginning he listened to experts. And I don’t fault him too harshly for some missteps during the first few weeks (and I emphasize the first few weeks) of the pandemic. Even Dr. Fauci in his new book goes pretty easy on Trump during the very early days of the pandemic. For example, there were pro’s and con’s regarding the banning of flights from China. At the time there wasn’t an obvious right answer and some of the foremost health experts were divided on the question. So if he got it wrong, I find it hard to assign too much blame. Of course, his lurch towards responsibility was only transient. He quickly reverted to form and was about as bad as it gets thereafter.
I would give Trump credit for two other accomplishments. First, he signed a criminal reform bill supported by Democrats. The second positive accomplishment was an executive order banning bump stocks, although that was overturned in the courts. Pretty much everything else he did was a godawful cluster****.
“inflation is the responsibility of the Fed (not the President)”
But Trump tried really hard to get the FED to lower interest rates.
Odd that all the concerns that Biden has “accomplished” are now supposed to frighten everyone about Trump being elected.
Of course, Biden would have handled COVID much differently and the world would have sailed through and avoided the forced shutdowns, mask mandates, social restrictions, and of course supply problems. People would still have gathered at the local restaurants and bars, movie theaters would have been full, sick elderly folks would have been given plush accommodations in private hospitals instead of being pushed back into nursing homes to infect others, businesses would have stayed open, employment would have grown, and the economy would have been booming. But, unfortunately, Joe Biden (or Hillary Clinton) were not POTUS, so shit happened.
Bruce Hall: I don’t understand your post. The WSJ assessments are made by economists, conditioning on what policies they think each candidate will undertake, holding constant exogenous factors like weather, climate change, bird flu, etc. So looking backward comparing to looking forward doesn’t make sense. However, I am willing to allow that I misunderstand the content of your remark.
I think Bruce’s problem is back comment etiquette. He’s probably responding to baffling/Ithaqua.
Bruce’s sneering tone, on the other hand, isn’t just a matter of etiquette. He is all in on the Hannity, Limbaugh, Trump, Father Coughlin approach to debate – make up for a lack of facts and broken logic with a haughty, mean style. It’s what you do when you’re wrong but against your own interest to admit it.
I’ve been listening to the new populists at the RNC. It seems they think Biden’s pro-labor policy moves are great. Funny thing – they actually think Trump is the one behind them. And of course Vance blamed the March 2003 invasion of Iraq on Biden as if Bush were never President.
Brucie! I hear you have been really busy. After all someone had to dumb down Project 2025 for Trump so they choose their dumbest spokesperson for the task. I’m sure you earned your pay. Now if you would only stop taking so much damn bleach.
Bruce Hall All this from the gullible fellow who still believes in the healing powers of hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin. You would do well to learn a little bit about epidemiology and the mathematics of a SIR model.