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America is off track. Immigration and homelessness crisis in large metropolises like Los Angeles is the best example. — Image: © AFP
You expect a certain degree of hard sell from any US administration. What you don’t expect is an “unsolicited testimonial” about how peachy-keen great things are from Barclays, published by Bloomberg.
To be strictly fair, any solid object which translates into good economics is welcome. The sheer scope of the grotesqueries of US politics makes any form of sanity good news. It may well be that a mix of new administration initiatives and some progressive business is turning this exceptionally long corner. After all these years of bluster and denialism, maybe something’s actually going right.
The fizziness is a little strained, though. It’s a bit like Snow White after a hangover figuring out what the Seven Dwarves have been doing:
- According to the Federal Reserve, the US has the strongest recovery in the world. Depends on where you draw the baseline. The US was in a deep hole for a long time. Either this means the hole isn’t as deep, or other holes might be deeper.
- US households still have cash accumulated from the pandemic. How do they do that? Ever heard of 18 months of price rises? Accumulated? Really?
- Long-term rates compare well to the Fed’s policy rates. The two rates have very little to do with each other. Long-term rates may relate to bonds, but not necessarily anything else.
- Legal immigration is on the rise. Does that mean anything? It might, but it’ll be spin, not solid economic numbers.
- A faster population increase is good according to someone. Apparently, you can improve payroll employment without decreasing unemployment. Does anyone happen to know how?
You see why all this exuberance is a bit hard to accept. There’s no mention of coast-to-coast shanty towns. No hint of gaping holes in the fundamentals. Nobody even pretending to be doing their jobs is the usual news. Poverty is just a word. They’ve been getting away with that one way too long.
The tackiness is getting tackier as the South melts in the haze. The Rust Belt is getting rustier by the decade. No cartels, no Fentanyl, no gun psychoses, or any of the other little folksy hobbies of America’s senility. Just fizz.
How is this good economics if 350 million people are living in an obsessive self-destructive hellhole? Nobody’s called off the gibbering idiots in all aspects of American life. Duly appointed incompetent corrupt lunatics are now a tradition. The fiction thinks it’s fact. There’s no objectivity; just nice selective passing numbers to crochet into a 5 minute read.
Every four years America has its political seizure in which nothing really gets done. Forget ADHD. This is how America’s attention span works; rarely if ever. Give some geriatric gerbils a few billion and pretend something’s actually getting done. Put positive spin on a vacuum.
Enough of the fizz. Trustworthy hard numbers, right now, please. Just omit the word “please”.
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