“MILTON FRIEDMAN ISN’T RUNNING THE SHOW ANYMORE:” Biden Administration Bracing for a Tsunami of Bad Economic News Next Week.
Politico calls the coming avalanche of bad economic news a “Category 5 storm.” Indeed, the Biden administration may want to dig a hole and hide while Biden goes to his summer home in Delaware, given the depressing numbers that will come out of Washington this coming week.
Consumer confidence numbers (which currently stink) hit on Tuesday. A Federal Reserve meeting and decision on interest rates, coupled with a press conference from Fed Chair Jerome Powell, follows up on Wednesday.
The first reading on second quarter economic growth drops on Thursday. And the latest numbers on our vexing run of historically high consumer price inflation close out the monster run of data on Friday. In a note to clients today, analysts at Deutsche Bank suggested the flood of information will “leave you breathless.”
Yikes.
For the White House, hope springs eternal. The administration has been touting the dropping price of a gallon of gas this month as if they’re reading the entrails of a newt and discovering that “prosperity is just around the corner,” as Herbert Hoover claimed right before the bottom dropped out of the economy.
But what are those newt entrails really telling us?
If only leading economists could have predicted the bad news:
UPDATE: Ahead of Expected Dismal Economic Data, White House Seeks to Redefine ‘Recession.’
Post-Reagan, recessions have a tendency to be politicized. The National Bureau of Economic Research redefined their recession definition to move the recession back from the third quarter of 2008 to December of 2007. Similarly, in the fall of 1992, the media hid the economic recovery occurring under George H.W. Bush’s watch to enable the Clintons’ “Worst recession in 50 years” lie. Or as a Time magazine headline writer described it with maximum self-satisfied snark on December 7th of 1992, “Bush’s Economic Present for Clinton.” The economy would grow 4.2 percent that quarter, but you never would have known it from the DNC-MSM until after November 3rd.
(Updated and bumped.)