Another Republican President, Another Recession.

hanimmal said:

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Roger A. Shrubber said:

that is why social media and news outlets have to be held accountable for the content they publish. if a news outlet publishes a story, they better be able to verify it. if they can't, it's a fucking hefty fine, and a public apology and rectification, in prime time, on their front page, where ever it will embarrass them the most. tucker carlson's head would explode in about 3 days, not being able to spew venomous bilious lies about whatever makes his tanned testicles shrivel up currently...
social media platforms would have to hire "police" to monitor content, and anything offensive, threatening, hateful, or intentionally misleading would be taken down on the spot. any account offending three times in a year is permanently banned. anyone caught running any kind of bot, permanently banned....the fuckers who own them are rich, they can afford the personnel.

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schuylaar said:

Go with the flow and drive what you can afford to put in your tank- YOU chose that vehicle. Don't blame Biden!

Actually while were at it stop blaming everyone for your shit!

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WASHINGTON (AP) — America’s employers shrugged off high inflation and weakening growth to add 372,000 jobs in June, a surprisingly strong gain that will likely spur the Federal Reserve to keep sharply raising interest rates to cool the economy and slow price increases.

The unemployment rate in June remained at 3.6% for a fourth straight month, the Labor Department said Friday, matching a near-50-year low that was reached before the pandemic struck in early 2020.

The past year’s streak of robust hiring has been good for job seekers and has led to higher pay for many employees. But it has also helped fuel the highest inflation in four decades and heightened pressure on the Fed to further slow borrowing and spending.

Many employers are still struggling to fill jobs, especially in the economy’s vast service sector, with Americans now traveling, eating out and attending public events with much greater frequency. The Fed may regard the June job gain as evidence that the rapid pace of hiring is feeding inflation as companies raise pay to attract workers and then increase prices to cover their higher labor costs.

The Fed has already embarked on its fastest series of rate hikes since the 1980s, and further large increases would making borrowing much costlier for consumers and businesses and increase the risk of a recession.

The persistent desire of many businesses to hire and grow is providing a bulwark against the likelihood that the economy will tip into recession over the next year. Even if a downturn does occur, the healthy job and pay growth of the past year could help keep it relatively brief and mild.

For now, there are roughly two posted job openings for every unemployed worker. And the number of people seeking unemployment benefits — a proxy for layoffs and an early indicator of a downturn — remains far below historic averages, although it has ticked up recently.

At the same time, economic growth has been negative for two straight quarters, consumers are slowing their spending with inflation at a four-decade high and home sales have fallen as the Fed has jacked up borrowing costs.

And hiring could weaken in the coming months. The Fed wants job growth to slow, at least modestly, as part of its strenuous efforts to cool the economy and curb high inflation. The Biden administration, too, has sought to portray any pullback in hiring as part of a welcome transition to a more sustainable economy that will help keep inflation down.

But the transition to a more sustainable pace of growth and hiring is likely to be a bumpy one. If, for example, the Fed’s rate cuts end up slowing growth too much, as many analysts fear, the economy could slide into a recession by next year. Already, signs of a slowdown are evident. In May, consumer spending, adjusted for inflation, fell for the first time since December. Sales of existing homes have fallen nearly 9% compared with a year ago.

And some companies are announcing layoffs, or have paused hiring. In particular, several large retailers, including Walmart and Amazon, have said they over-hired during the pandemic, with Walmart reducing its headcount by attrition.

Tesla is cutting about 3.5% of its total headcount. Netflix has laid off about 450 employees after it reported losing subscribers for the first time in more than a decade. The online automotive retailer Carvana and real estate companies Redfin and Compass have also announced job cuts.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell has held out hope that the economy will continue to expand even as the central bank raises borrowing costs at its fastest pace since the late 1980s. But Powell has also acknowledged that overseas factors, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has elevated gas and food prices, will make it difficult to avoid a recession.

Last month, he conceded that a recession “is not our intended outcome but it’s certainly a possibility.”

The job market has recovered much more rapidly from the pandemic recession than it did after previous downturns.

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hanimmal said:

And now here we are one full year out, and the inevitable far right propagandist are crying about inflation (ignoring that the national income has increased by a larger amount and that under Biden's presidency the massive job losses that were led by Trump's shit handling of the pandemic has been cleaned up). Because they are parroting the narrative that the wealthy want out there to scaremonger people into not demanding higher prices for their labor.

And just as we start to move out of the inflationary lows of 2021 (around May-June), cue the Republican's savior of Putin to threaten to start a war that will cause the gas prices to soar even higher than the artificially held lows in Trump's final year in office.

So while you might pretend like this thread is not 'aged well', you are wrong. This Tea Party 2.0 inflationary snow flaking to try to sink the Democratic agenda which has once again saved the American workers from a Republican recession is exactly why I made it almost 2 years ago. Because the right wing hate mongers paying the militarized trolls (foreign and domestic) are very predictable, and right now are trying like hell to rewrite history once again to help the Republicans win back enough power in DC to make sure that the mega rich can get away with not paying taxes for another generation.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Surging prices for gas, food and rent catapulted U.S. inflation to a new four-decade peak in June, further pressuring households and likely sealing the case for another large interest rate hike by the Federal Reserve, with higher borrowing costs to follow.

Consumer prices soared 9.1% compared with a year earlier, the government said Wednesday, the biggest yearly increase since 1981, and up from an 8.6% jump in May. On a monthly basis, prices rose 1.3% from May to June, another substantial increase, after prices had jumped 1% from April to May.

The ongoing price increases underscore the brutal impact that inflation has inflicted on many families, with the costs of necessities, in particular, rising much faster than average incomes. Lower-income and Black and Hispanic Americans have been hit especially hard, because a disproportionate share of their income goes toward such essentials as housing, transportation and food.

Some economists have held out hope that inflation might be reaching or nearing a short-term peak. Gas prices, for example, have fallen from the eye-watering $5 a gallon reached in mid-June to an average of $4.63 nationwide Wednesday — still far higher than a year ago but a drop that could help slow inflation for July and possibly August.

In addition, shipping costs and commodity prices have begun to fall. Pay increases have slowed. And surveys show that Americans’ expectations for inflation over the long run have eased — a trend that often points to more moderate price increases over time.

Still, the breadth of the price gains shows how rising costs have seeped into nearly every corner of the economy. Grocery prices have jumped 12.2% compared with a year ago, the steepest such climb since 1979. Rents have risen 5.8%, the most since 1986. New car prices have increased 11.4% from a year earlier. And airline fares, one of the few items to post a price decline in June, are nevertheless up 34% from a year earlier.

From May to June, the cost of dental services surged 1.9%, the biggest one-month increase since record-keeping began in 1995.

The relentless spike in inflation has diminished consumers’ confidence in the economy, sent President Joe Biden’s approval ratings tumbling and posed a major political threat to Democrats in the November congressional elections. Forty percent of adults said in a June AP-NORC poll that they thought tackling inflation should be a top government priority this year, up from just 14% who said so in December.

In the immediate aftermath of the 2020 pandemic recession, as Americans focused their spending on items for the home, like furniture, appliances and exercise equipment, supply chains became overwhelmed and prices for physical goods soared. But as consumer spending has gradually shifted away from goods and toward services like vacation travel, restaurants meals, movies, concerts and sporting events, some of the highest price increases have occurred in services.

Housing costs have also risen sharply. A shortage of houses for sale has kept prices high just as mortgage rates have also soared.

With many people priced out of the market for houses and looking instead to rent, demand for apartments has sent rental rates beyond affordable levels. The average cost of new leases has jumped 14% in the past year, according to real estate brokerage Redfin, to an average of $2,016 a month.

Rents as measured by the government’s inflation index have risen more slowly because they include all rents, including existing leases. But economists expect the rising expense of new leases to send the government’s inflation measure higher in coming months.

The persistence of high inflation has unnerved Chair Jerome Powell and other Fed officials, who are engaged in the fastest series of rate hikes since the late 1980s to try to slow the price spikes. The central bank is expected to raise its key short-term rate later this month by a hefty three-quarters of a point, as it did last month, with potentially more large rate hikes to follow.

Powell has stressed that the central bank wants to see “compelling evidence” that inflation is slowing before it would dial back its rate hikes. Such evidence would need to be a “series of declining monthly inflation readings,” Powell said at a news conference last month.

Many economists worry that the Fed’s drive to quell inflation will cause it to tighten credit too aggressively even while the economy, by some measures, is slowing. Much higher borrowing costs could trigger a recession, potentially by next year.

Consumers have started to pull back on spending, home sales are falling as mortgage rates rise and factory output slipped in May. Yet steadily robust job growth points to an economy that is still expanding, with little sign of an imminent recession.

Though inflation may slow later this year, it’s not clear by how much. Oil prices fell Tuesday to about $96 a barrel. And other commodities, including metals such as copper, have also become less expensive, mostly because of recession fears in both the United States and Europe.

With fewer ships stuck at the Port of Los Angeles and Long Beach, America’s largest, shipping costs for international freight have fallen. Wholesale gas prices have fallen to about $3.40 a gallon, which suggests that retail prices could drop to as low as $4.20 by August, according to Omair Sharif, founder of Inflation Insights.

And wholesale used car prices are also falling, which point to declining used car prices in the coming months.

Inflation has spiked overseas as well. It reached 9.1% in the United Kingdom in May, the highest level in four decades, driven mostly by higher gas and food prices. Annual inflation in the eurozone’s 19 countries hit 8.6% in June, surging past the 8.1% recorded in May. Inflation is now at its highest level since recordkeeping for the euro began in 1997.

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hanimmal said:

https://apnews.com/article/inflation-economy-prices-consumer-74e1a5c9bced40460e4079f62e980095
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Roger A. Shrubber said:

"Some economists have held out hope that inflation might be reaching or nearing a short-term peak. Gas prices, for example, have fallen from the eye-watering $5 a gallon reached in mid-June to an average of $4.63 nationwide Wednesday — still far higher than a year ago but a drop that could help slow inflation for July and possibly August."

i'm about fed up with oil industry executives, it's about time to lynch a few of them, publicly. let the other price gouging profiteers see what the fuck is coming for them if they keep it up. right now they are a MAJOR reason for the inflation we're dealing with, while they keep raking in record profits...they could drop the prices to $3.00 a gallon and still be making good money, and not destroying the lives of poor people who are losing jobs, homes, vehicles because they can't keep up with inflation.

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NEW YORK (AP) — Consumers picked up their spending from May to June, underscoring their resilience despite painfully higher prices at the gas pump and in grocery aisles and allaying fears that the economy might be on the verge of a recession.

U.S. retail sales rose 1% in June, from a revised decline of 0.1 % in May, the Commerce Department said Friday.

The figures aren’t adjusted for inflation and so largely reflect higher prices, particularly for gas. But they also show that consumers are still providing crucial support for the economy and spending on such discretionary items as furniture, restaurant meals and sporting goods.

At the same time, last month’s spending gain is modest enough that it likely won’t encourage the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates even more aggressively. Stock prices rose after the report’s release.

“People did not fold in the face of the Ukraine shock and the subsequent surge in food and energy prices,” said Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics. “Instead, they ran down a small part of their pandemic savings in order to keep up their discretionary spending.”

Consumers still have significant savings, on average, bolstered by pandemic-era government relief checks and strong hiring and pay gains. JPMorgan executives said Thursday that their customers are still breaking out their credit and debit cards at a healthy pace.

Kathy Bostjancic, chief U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, said that excluding inflation, retail sales still rose about 0.3% in June, up from a contraction of 0.4% in May. She expects the economy to grow at a slim 0.5% annual rate in the April-June quarter, after shrinking in the first three months of the year.

The report showed consumers’ ongoing appetite for non-essentials like gadgets and furniture. In fact, sales at furniture stores rose 1.4%, while consumer electronics stores rose 0.4%. Online sales showed resurgence, posting a 2.2% increase. Business at restaurants was up 1%. But department stores took a hit, posting a 2.6% decline.

The solid figures bold well for the back-to-school shopping season, the second largest sales period behind the winter holidays. Mastercard SpendingPulse, which tracks spending across all payment forms including cash, forecasts that back-to-school spending will be up 7.5% from July 14 through Sept. 5 compared with the year-ago period when sales rose 11%.

But spending is volatile. The latest round of retail earnings reports released in May showed some slowing of spending, particularly with low-income shoppers. RH, an upscale furniture chain, cut it sales outlook for the year last last month, pointing to deteriorating macro-economic conditions. It cited higher mortgage rates, which are slowing sales of luxury homes, indicating that even wealthy shoppers are pulling back.

Nevertheless, the overall solid spending came even as shoppers were confronted with high prices in all areas. U.S. inflation surged to a new four-decade high in June because of rising prices for gas, food and rent, squeezing household budgets and pressuring the Fed to raise rates aggressively — trends that raise the risk of a recession.

The government’s consumer price index soared 9.1% in June compared with a year ago, the biggest yearly increase since 1981, with nearly half of the increase due to higher energy costs. The year-over-year leap in consumer prices last month followed an 8.6% annual jump in May. From May to June, prices rose 1.3%, following a 1% increase from April to May.

Some economists believe inflation might be reaching a short-term peak. Gas prices, for example, have fallen from $5 a gallon reached in mid-June to an average of $4.57 nationwide Thursday — still far higher than a year ago.

Arie Kotler, chairman, president and CEO of Arko Corp., one of the largest operators of convenience stores in the U.S., believes that if gas prices keep coming down “people will have more money in their pocket to spend inside the store.” The chain, located mostly in rural and small towns, continues to offer deals on coffee and food like $1.99 for a slice of pizza.

Accelerating inflation is a big problem for the Fed, too. The central bank is already involved in the fastest series of interest rate hikes in three decades, which it hopes will tame inflation by tamping down borrowing and spending by consumers and businesses.

The retail sales report covers about a third of overall consumer spending and doesn’t include services, such as haircuts, hotel stays and plane tickets.

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https://www.rawstory.com/maria-bartiromo-ro-khanna-inflation/

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) offered Fox News host Maria Bartiromo a lesson in inflation on Sunday after she suggested that President Joe Biden was to blame.

In an interview on Fox News, Bartiromo told Khanna that Covid-19 legislation signed into law by Biden "was the beginning of inflation getting stoked."

"Maria, just to be factual on inflation," Khanna replied, "there was $3 trillion of spending under President Trump. And yes, there was spending under Joe Biden. But it is unfair to say that it's just the spending under Biden that somehow caused the inflation and not under Trump."

Bartiromo interrupted: "Just to be clear, I'm looking specifically at the numbers and when we look at the inflation timeline, which was the handover from President Trump to President Biden. ... By the time that we got to July of 2021, inflation was at 5.5%. Then the Democrats led the infrastructure package. That was signed into law November 21 and inflation was up to 6.8%. By March of 2022, right after the invasion by Russia, inflation was at 7.9% and today we are 8.6%"

"So we're up to 9.1%, Congressman, with all of this spending," she said.

"But, Maria, you know correlation and causation are different," Khanna remarked. "You can't say that Trump sending stimulus checks in December of 2020 was not inflationary and somehow Biden doing in March was inflationary."

"What happened is we got out of Covid," he added. "And that increased demand and the supply was constrained and the Fed policy was wrong."

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The Senate passed a bipartisan bill Wednesday that would provide $52 billion in subsidies to domestic semiconductor manufacturers and invest billions in science and technology innovation, in a bid to strengthen the United States’ competitiveness and self-reliance in what is seen as a keystone industry for economic and national security.

In a 64-33 vote, the Senate passed the $280 billion “Chips and Science Act,” the final iteration of a bill that was years in the making. About $52 billion would go to microchip manufacturers to incentivize construction of domestic semiconductor fabrication plants — or “fabs” — to make the chips, which are used in a wide variety of products, including motor vehicles, cellphones, medical equipment and military weapons.
A shortage of semiconductor chips during the coronavirus pandemic has caused price hikes and supply-chain disruptions in several industries.

“This is one of the most significant, long-term-thinking bills we’ve passed in a very long time,” Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Wednesday. “I told our caucus yesterday that our grandchildren will hold good-paying jobs in industries we can’t even imagine because of what we are doing now. … This is going to go down as one of the major bipartisan achievements of this Congress.”

The bill also includes about $100 billion in authorizations over five years for programs such as expanding the National Science Foundation’s work and establishing regional technology hubs to support start-ups in areas of the country that haven’t traditionally drawn big funding for tech.

“These investments will go a long way in reversing the decline in federal [research and development] that has dropped threefold since 1978,” said Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), chair of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. “And the more dispersed the innovation is, you never know where the next Bill Gates or Bill Boeing is going to be from and what innovation they might come up with.”

The bill next moves to the House, where Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has said it has support for passage. In a statement Wednesday, Pelosi praised the Senate’s passage of the bill as a “major victory for American families and the American economy,” and indicated the House would vote on the bill as early as Thursday.

President Biden has said the legislation is one of the top priorities on his agenda and called for Congress to get the bill to his desk as soon as possible. On Wednesday, he praised the bill as one answer to Americans’ worry about the state of the economy and cost of living.

“It will accelerate the manufacturing of semiconductors in America, lowering prices on everything from cars to dishwashers,” Biden said in a statement. “It also will create jobs — good-paying jobs right here in the United States. It will mean more resilient American supply chains, so we are never so reliant on foreign countries for the critical technologies that we need for American consumers and national security.”

In a White House meeting with business and labor leaders Monday, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo noted that the United States used to make 40 percent of the world’s chips but now makes about 12 percent — and “essentially none of the leading-edge chips,” which come almost entirely from Taiwan.

The United States has invested “nearly nothing” in semiconductor manufacturing, while China has invested $150 billion to build its domestic capacity, Raimondo said. She also said it was critical for the United States to be able to compete with countries around the world that have been providing subsidies to semiconductor companies to build factories.

“The chips funding will be the deciding factor on where those companies choose to expand,” Raimondo said. “We want them, we need them, to expand here in the United States.”

Included in the legislation are provisions that would prohibit companies from building most types of new semiconductor manufacturing facilities in China “or any other foreign country of concern” for a decade after receiving federal funding.

On Wednesday, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), a key GOP negotiator on the legislation, argued that there was no more important competition than the one for “technological supremacy” between the United States and China.

“The outcome will shape the global balance of power for decades and will impact the security and prosperity of all Americans,” Wicker said.

“Regrettably, at this moment, we are not in the driver’s seat on a range of important technologies. China is. China and other nations are increasingly dominant in tech innovation, posing a massive threat to not only our economy but to our national security.”

The White House has also pointed to the semiconductor chip shortage as a national security issue. In an interview Tuesday with Washington Post Live, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), an original co-sponsor of the bill, said some senators joined a classified briefing a few weeks ago at which they learned about some of the geopolitical concerns the United States is facing.

“And it helped create a greater sense of urgency, I hope, in both the House and the Senate … to help everyone see how important and how urgent this is,” Sinema said. “The good news is that we were able to respond to that quickly. And I expect, by the end of the week, our bill is going to be on the president’s desk.”

The bill’s Senate passage Wednesday culminates a years-long quest by Schumer, who has long warned of the threat that China’s rise poses to U.S. global economic leadership and national security. Three years ago, Schumer started drafting a precursor bill with Sen. Todd C. Young (R-Ind.), and the legislation took a tortuous path to passage — undergoing at least five renamings and countless revisions before its passage Wednesday as “The Chips and Science Act of 2022.”

“The idea of investing in companies and in science had taken a back seat for the last 30 or 40 years, in part because Democrats didn’t want to help companies and Republicans said they don’t want industrial policy, just be laissez-faire,” Schumer said in an interview Wednesday. “It took a long time to convince people that this was so important and so necessary.”

Schumer and Young assembled a powerful panel of backers from outside politics, including corporate leaders and academic luminaries who helped build support for the legislation across party lines. Adding the semiconductor provisions, backed initially by Sens. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) and Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), further expanded the coalition behind the bill.

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hanimmal said:

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hanimmal said:

I really wish he would have also pointed out that there were millions out of work when Biden took over the presidency and that the Covid package that the Democrats passed had to shore up state and local governments (actually funding of the police which Republicans voted against) because Trump and the Republicans used their larger Covid bill as a giant grift.

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