Tag: economy

Do We All Have PTSD?

Just how much mental and psychological trauma exists in the country and world today cannot be quantified, and I would not trust any studies that tried. But this much is clear. We have lost our footing in knowing something that scientists long believed we could know: whether and to what extent an economy is growing and prospering or going the opposite way. 

Everyone seems just to be winging it these days. Ever since lockdowns utterly broke reporting, it’s been hard to tell up from down. 

The substantial hits taken by major financial indexes over the last two months seem to have triggered a shift in public sentiment from indifferent to gloomy. Probably this has nothing to do with the vast wealth held in invested retirement accounts. 

Each refresh of the page seems to deliver more bad news. 

This has in turn affected the willingness to spend and the outlook generally. 

And yet there is something strange going on. 

Inflation in real time is genuinely down from its 4-year trend and showing the best numbers since 2020. Even the CPI reflects this. The jobs outlook for the private sector is slightly improving. 

Why has consumer sentiment suddenly taken a dive? 

It’s odd because there is a paucity of evidence for a sudden shift, unless tariffs are to blame, which seems doubtful (to me). 

One possible theory: the public has a form of economic post-traumatic stress disorder, a clinical name for what was once called battle fatigue and shell shock. It is what happens to the human spirit in the face of something unexpected, terrible, and ultimately traumatizing. There are stages of recovery that move from denial, anger, bargaining, and depression, with acceptance as the last stage. 

That might be where we are. For years now, the national media and government agencies have claimed that all is well. Inflation is cooling. Job growth is strong. The recovery is upon us. Countless media articles have bemoaned the gap that separates real data and maudlin public perceptions. We are encouraged to believe that “shutting down the economy” is really no big deal, just something you do before turning it on again. 

Stop complaining! You are rich! 

It was the ultimate in economic gaslighting, something about which many of us have been kvetching for five years now. 

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EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin Launches Largest Deregulatory Effort in U.S. History to ‘Save Coal, Bring Down Cost of Living’

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin said it is “not a binary choice” to either protect the environment or grow the economy.

“We don’t have to just choose one,” he explained.

Joining Breitbart News Washington bureau chief Matt Boyle on the Breitbart News Saturday radio show, Zeldin went over his recent historic launch of the largest deregulatory effort in U.S. history and talked about the EPA’s sweeping deregulations to “save the coal industry” and “bring down the cost of living.” 

After announcing 31 deregulations on Wednesday, including the termination of the Biden administration’s “Environmental Justice and DEI arms of the agency (EJ/DEI),” Zeldin told Boyle, “Undoubtedly, we’re going to be able to create jobs, including inside the American auto sector.”

“We will bring down the cost of living. It’s going to be easier to heat your home, to purchase a vehicle, to operate a business,” the former New York congressman said, touting President Donald Trump’s economic plan. 

“A lot of Americans struggling to make ends meet want common sense back into the federal government, and we’re going to do our part at the EPA,” Zeldin continued. “So that’s why we made this announcement. It’s a lot of regulatory actions impacting the energy space. We want to make it easier for people to be able to access choice.”

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Germany’s Perfect Storm: Skyrocketing Knife Crime, Crumbling Economy, and Failed Leadership Threaten National Stability

As Germany contends with a faltering economy, soaring prices, rising unemployment, intensifying political violence, and mounting geopolitical instability, it also faces an alarming surge in knife crime—an epidemic fueled by decades of failed leadership, reckless, short-sighted policies, and unchecked mass immigration from countries with alien cultures.

In North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state with over 18 million residents, knife crime has surged dramatically.

Citing police data, State Interior Minister Herbert Reul, a member of the liberal globalist Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party, reported that 2023 saw 7,295 knife-related crimes—a 20.7% increase from the previous year, which had already marked a 44% rise from the year before.

What’s more alarming? Despite making up 16.1% of North-Rhine Westphalia’s population, foreigners made up nearly half (47.6%) of the suspects.

The police data, meanwhile, revealed that native Germans bear the brunt of the knife-related violence, accounting for 60.1% of the victims.

However, these statistics do not tell the full story. German authorities do not track the foreign backgrounds of newly naturalized German citizens, which allows them to downplay the growing crime rates and their connection to mass migration.

State Interior Minister Herbert Reul, despite holding office for years, now claims he’ll take action to curb the rise of knife attacks.

“I hope that we will see the first positive effects here in the coming year and that this knife violence will be curbed. Otherwise, we will have to make adjustments,” the CDU politician vaguely stated. But talk is cheap—he introduced a ten-point plan to tackle knife crime last August, and yet, violence continues to escalate.

While the official report states overall crime rates are down by 1 percent, this is misleading. The largest drop came from drug-related offenses, which fell by over 30%—likely due to the legalization of marijuana.

Meanwhile, the number of murders rose by nearly 16 percent last year, from 154 to 180 cases. Again, foreigners make up nearly half of the suspects in the most serious violent crimes—murder and manslaughter. The same is true for burglaries.

Over the past decade, violent crime has climbed by 20%, with non-German passport holders accounting for 41.8% of suspects.

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Trump Effect: Gas Prices PLUMMET Below $3 in 31 States — A Stark Contrast to Biden’s $5/Gallon Disaster

After years of economic pain at the pump under Joe Biden, Americans are finally seeing some relief as gas prices continue to decline under President Donald Trump’s second term.

On Thursday, the national average price for a gallon of regular gas sat at $3.07, according to AAA, significantly lower than what drivers were forced to pay during Biden’s disastrous tenure.

It’s a stark contrast to the Biden years when the cost of fuel soared to over $5 per gallon, an all-time high, thanks to reckless policies, overregulation, and a war on American energy.

Under Trump, who prioritized energy independence in his first term, Americans saw an average gas price of just $2.47 per gallon between 2017 and 2021. But as soon as Biden stepped into the Oval Office, that all changed.

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Here’s How the Media Is Covering up Plunging Egg Prices

Earlier this week, we reported that the price of a dozen eggs, which had reached a record high of $8.17 in early March, had fallen by more than two dollars, now sitting well below the $7 average when President Trump took office in January. As I pointed out at the time, this was bad news for Democrats, who had hoped that sky-high egg prices would be the silver bullet to drive down Trump’s approval ratings and fuel a Democratic resurgence. But with egg prices continuing to drop, the left-wing media has now stepped in to claim that egg prices are still on the rise.

According to Trading Economics, the price of a dozen eggs is now below $5/dozen, lower than they were around Christmastime last year. But the mainstream media doesn’t want you to know that.

Reporting on the declining rate of inflation in February, ABC News didn’t report on the latest egg prices. Instead, the network declared, “Egg prices, however, a closely watched symbol of price increases, soared 58.8% in February compared to a year ago, accelerating from the previous month.”

They weren’t alone. 

“Egg Prices Are Still Surging, Hitting Consumers’ Wallets,” the New York Times claimed in a headline on Wednesday, even though egg prices were actually declining.

“Egg prices continued their upward climb in February despite some easing in overall inflation, further straining consumers seeking relief from rising prices in the grocery aisles,” the article noted, completely ignoring the sharp decline in March.

MarketWatch was no better.

The cost of eggs jumped a little more than 10% in February after a 15% increase in January — and prices are likely to remain high for a while.

The surge in egg prices stems from outbreaks of the avian flu that have resulted in millions of chickens being slaughtered. It takes at least several months for egg-laying chickens to repopulate.

Not only that, but Easter is just around the corner. It’s the biggest egg-selling period of the year and is likely to keep upward pressure on egg prices given the increased demand.

The Trump administration has announced its intention to lower the cost of eggs, but the effort is just getting under way, and it’s unclear whether and how it will work.

Yahoo! Finance also ignored the recent data to cover up the sharp decline in egg prices.

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Moral Bankruptcy: Justifying the Ukraine War as Good for the US Economy

Supporters of the U.S.-NATO proxy war in Ukraine employ a range of dubious justifications.  One is a refurbished version of the old domino theory used during the Cold War – if the United States and its allies don’t help Ukraine expel Russian occupation forces, the victorious Kremlin will then launch offensives against other European countries and eventually dominate the Continent. Another popular rationale is that what might appear to be a mundane struggle between two authoritarian regimes is actually an existential conflict between democracy and autocracy, with Ukraine representing the former and Russia the latter.

Both cases are fallacious. The neo-domino theory wildly overrates Russia’s geostrategic prowess. A military that has encountered trouble subduing Ukraine poses no credible threat to larger, more powerful potential adversaries, such as France, Germany, and Great Britain, or even smaller powers such as Poland, Italy, or Turkey. Likewise, the attempt to portray the fighting in Ukraine as a crucial struggle between democracy and authoritarianism falls flat. Ukraine is not a democracy, even if the most expansive, generous definition is used.

Still another frequent argument that American proponents of backing Ukraine use is that sending arms to Kyiv is good for the U.S. economy, not a multi-billion dollar financial drain on taxpayers.  Officials in Joe Biden’s administration, including the president himself, increasingly resorted to that justification as domestic discontent mounted regarding Washington’s Ukraine policy. Administration policymakers proudly insisted that most of the aid money ended up remaining in the United States.

During a February 20, 2024, speech at a new General Dynamics factory outside Dallas Texas, Biden made the alleged “economic benefits” argument explicitly. A supplemental spending measure pending in Congress at the time contained a total of $95 billion in foreign aid, including money for Ukraine, Israel, and other countries. Of the $60.7 billion for Ukraine, $38.8 billion would go to U.S. factories that made missiles, munitions and other gear. “While this bill sends military equipment to Ukraine,” Biden emphasized, “it spends the money right here in the United States of America in places like Arizona, where the Patriot missiles are built; and Alabama, where the Javelin missiles are built; and Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Texas, where artillery shells are made.”

Republican pro-Ukraine hawks embraced similar “logic” about why billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine were not only necessary from the standpoint of U.S. foreign policy, but also beneficial to the U.S. economy.  Then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) “repeatedly implored his colleagues to understand that the funds from the package are for historic investments “’right here in America.’”

“This is about rebuilding the arsenal of democracy,” McConnell said in a floor speech during the long days of debate, “and demonstrating to our allies and adversaries alike that we’re serious about exercising American strength.”

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Brace Yourselves: The Next Media BIG LIE Is About to Drop

Before I tell you about the legacy dinosaur media’s next BIG LIE, I need to show you how they’ll sell it. It starts, as these things always do, with the Left attempting to control the language to alter your perceptions about how the economy performed under Presidentish Joe Biden and will perform under President Donald Trump.

We might be done with Biden but he isn’t done with us, as you’re about to see.

There was a recession in late 2021/early 2022, commonly defined as two consecutive quarters of economic shrinkage. Except the “non-partisan” National Bureau of Economic Research decided to change the commonly understood definition. In 2022, wouldn’t you know, it turned out that “many factors go into that calculation,” and that the Biden recession wasn’t a recession at all when you looked at the “many factors” that nobody had ever looked at before. 

The White House got into the game, too, with the White House Council of Economic Advisors citing a “holistic look at the data,” instead of playing by the established rules.

The press played along and pretended the recession never happened.

Convenient, eh?

I’d also add that if you take away Biden’s monstrous budget deficits, any economic growth that happened on his watch was an illusion. We entered a government-engineered recession during the lockdowns of 2020 and, thanks to epic economic mismanagement under Biden, we never left it. 

Budget deficits are a drag on future growth and should be subtracted from our GDP figures. But the same government that spends more than it takes in — currently by trillions of dollars — pretends that deficits are growth and, again, the press plays along.

So convenient. 

Private sector jobs and wages stagnated under Biden because everything was driven by Big Government and sold to you by Big Media. 

It was a helluva party that Biden threw for his well-connected buddies. Now comes the hangover, and some on the Left already have a word for the recession that hasn’t happened yet: Trumpcession.

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The History of Regime Change in Ukraine and the IMF’s Bitter “Economic Medicine”

We must understand the history of the U.S.-sponsored February 2014 Coup d’Etat which paved the wave for the adoption of IMF-World Bank shock treatment, namely the imposition of devastating macro-economic reforms coupled with conditionalities. This process –imposed by the Washington Consensus– was applied in developing countries since the 1980s, and in Eastern Europe and in the countries of the Soviet Union starting in the early 1990s.

Below is an the article describing the IMF reforms which I wrote in early March 2014, in the immediate wake of the Euromaidan Coup d’Etat which was led by the two major Nazi “parties”: Right Sektor and Svoboda, with the financial support of Washington.

What Is the End Game

The World Bank and the IMF reforms –while establishing the ground work– are no longer the main actors, representing the country’s creditors.

The traditional IMF-World Bank reforms are in many regards obsolete.

The Neoliberal Endgame for Ukraine –resulting from unsurmountable debts– largely attributable to military aid is the outright privatization of an entire country by BlackRock which is a giant portfolio company controlled by powerful financial interests with extensive leverage.

BlackRock signed an agreement with President Zelensky in November 2022.

The Privatization of Ukraine was launched in liaison with BlackRock’s consulting company McKinsey, a public relations firm which has largely been responsible for co-opting corrupt politicians and officials worldwide, not to mention scientists and intellectuals on behalf of powerful financial interests.

The Kyiv government engaged BlackRock’s consulting arm in November to determine how best to attract that kind of capital, and then added JPMorgan in February. Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced last month that the country was working with the two financial groups and consultants at McKinsey.

BlackRock and Ukraine’s Ministry of Economy signed a Memorandum of Understanding in November 2022. In late December 2022, president Zelensky and BlackRock’s CEO Larry Fink agreed on an investment strategy.

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Denver Mayor Mike Johnston floats 20% service charge to tackle restaurant woes

Denver Mayor Mike Johnston wants to add a 20% service charge to local restaurant tabs — and then tax it — to help restaurants cope with the city’s minimum wage and promote what he called pay equity among tipped and non-tipped employees.

On Monday, Johnston told City Cast Denver, a popular podcast, that he has already been discussing the idea with restaurant owners. He didn’t say whether they are on board. He also did not discuss if increasing people’s dinner costs would decrease restaurant visits. 

Johnston has incurred the ire of some local restauranteurs, who this month penned a letter expressing their frustrations with the city for everything from public safety worries and negative perceptions of downtown to parking and infrastructure needs.

They pointed to a series of stabbings on the 16th Street Mall over a January weekend that left two dead and two more injured.

“You ran your entire campaign platform on restoring our Downtown Denver business districts,” Dave Query, owner of Jax Fish House & Oyster Bar, said in his letter to Johnston. “It has gotten worse since you took the position of Mayor, even though you have received $550M towards stewarding it in a different direction.”

He added: “This is the current vibe and energy on our downtown streets, and our long-time LoDo and Larimer guests are now driving to Cherry Creek and NorthField and Golden for dinner and entertainment.”

“We know it’s a challenge,” Johnston told City Cast Denver, noting that restaurant labor costs have increased by 200% over the past decade. “We’ve had 400 restaurants close in Denver over the last three or four years and we know that a big part of that is the increase in the minimum wage, and we want folks to make more money.”

The challenge, he said, is ensuring an equitable and livable wage, while allowing restaurants to thrive.

Johnston said a recent restaurant tour group told him that wage disparities exist across the industry, with tipped servers making as much as $120,000 in annual salary because they have both the city’s minimum wage, plus tips, compared to the back-of-the-house staffers, such as cooks and dishwashers, who, he said, make $40,000.

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President Trump Dismantles Fake News Media’s Narrative for High Egg Prices: ‘I’ve Been Here for Three Weeks’

President Donald Trump immediately addressed the media’s latest fixation on skyrocketing egg prices, a crisis they’ve been quick to blame on his recent return to the White House.

As Trump arrived at Palm Beach International Airport on Sunday en route to the Daytona 500, he was immediately questioned by reporters about the record-high egg prices, a topic that has been sensationalized by media outlets looking to blame his administration.

“Well, there’s a flu. Before I got here, it was already at an all-time high,” Trump said.

“I’ve been here for three weeks. I have had nothing to do with inflation. This was caused by Biden. I had four years of virtually no inflation. So I’m just taking over. But I’ll tell you what, this country has made more progress in the last three weeks than it’s made in the last four years, and we’re respected again as a country.”

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