FOUR YEARS AGO TODAY IN THE ATLANTIC:

As Jon Miltimore of the Foundation for Economic Education wrote a year later: Today Is the 1-Year Anniversary of the Worst Pandemic Headline of 2020.

It’s a headline that certainly grabs your attention.

“Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice,” read the title of an April 29, 2020 article in The Atlantic.

Written by staff writer Amanda Mull, the story suggested Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s decision to reverse course on the state’s shutdown and lift restrictions on businesses was an experiment to see “how many people need to lose their lives to shore up the economy.”

The decision, readers were told, was reckless and deadly.

“Public-health officials broadly agree that reopening businesses—especially those that require close physical contact—in places where the virus has already spread will kill people,” Mull wrote.

Without the government to protect them, all Georgians could do is “try to protect themselves as best they can,” Mull said. But she concluded that, because of the way the virus works, another deluge of cases “could be inevitable.”

“[It] may be two or three weeks before hospitals see a new wave of people whose lungs look like they’re studded with ground glass in X-rays,” Mull wrote. “By then, there’s no telling how many more people could be carrying the disease into nail salons or tattoo parlors, going about their daily lives because they were told they could do so safely.”

To be fair, then-President Trump had similar fears as Mull when Gov. Kemp said he wanted to reopen the state:

In April 2020, businesses in Georgia were shuttered by government decree as in most of the rest of the country. Mr. Kemp was hearing from desperate entrepreneurs: “ ‘Look man, we’re losing everything we’ve got. We can’t keep doing this.’ And I really felt like there was a lot of people fixin’ to revolt against the government.”

The Trump administration “had that damn graph or matrix or whatever that you had to fit into to be able to do certain things,” Mr. Kemp recalls. “Your cases had to be going down and whatever. Well, we felt like we met the matrix, and so I decided to move forward and open up.” He alerted Vice President Mike Pence, who headed the White House’s coronavirus task force, before publicly announcing his intentions on April 20.

That afternoon Mr. Trump called Mr. Kemp, “and he was furious.” Mr. Kemp recounts the conversation as follows:

“Look, the national media’s all over me about letting you do this,” Mr. Trump said. “And they’re saying you don’t meet whatever.”

Mr. Kemp replied: “Well, Mr. President, we sent your team everything, and they knew what we were doing. You’ve been saying the whole pandemic you trust the governors because we’re closest to the people. Just tell them you may not like what I’m doing, but you’re trusting me because I’m the governor of Georgia and leave it at that. I’ll take the heat.”

“Well, see what you can do,” the president said. “Hair salons aren’t essential and bowling alleys, tattoo parlors aren’t essential.”

“With all due respect, those are our people,” Mr. Kemp said. “They’re the people that elected us. They’re the people that are wondering who’s fighting for them. We’re fixin’ to lose them over this, because they’re about to lose everything. They are not going to sit in their basement and lose everything they got over a virus.”

Mr. Trump publicly attacked Mr. Kemp: “He went on the news at 5 o’clock and just absolutely trashed me. . . . Then the local media’s all over me—it was brutal.” The president was still holding daily press briefings on Covid. “After running over me with the bus on Monday, he backed over me on Tuesday,” Mr. Kemp says. “I could either back down and look weak and lose all respect with the legislators and get hammered in the media, or I could just say, ‘You know what? Screw it, we’re holding the line. We’re going to do what’s right.’ ” He chose the latter course. “Then on Wednesday, him and [Anthony] Fauci did it again, but at that point it didn’t really matter. The damage had already been done there, for me anyway.”

The damage healed quickly once businesses began reopening on Friday, April 24. Mr. Kemp quotes a state lawmaker who said in a phone call: “I went and got my hair cut, and the lady that cuts my hair wanted me to tell you—and she started crying when she told me this story—she said, ‘You tell the governor I appreciate him reopening, to allow me to make a choice, because . . . if I’d have stayed closed, I had a 95% chance of losing everything I’ve ever worked for. But if I open, I only had a 5% chance of getting Covid. And so I decided to open, and the governor gave me that choice.’”

At that point, Florida was still shut down. Mr. DeSantis issued his first reopening order on April 29, nine days after Mr. Kemp’s. On April 28, the Florida governor had visited the White House, where, as CNN reported, “he made sure to compliment the President and his handling of the crisis, praise Trump returned in spades.”

Three years later, here’s the thanks Mr. DeSantis gets: This Wednesday Mr. Trump issued a statement excoriating “Ron DeSanctimonious” as “a big Lockdown Governor on the China Virus.” As Mr. Trump now tells the tale, “other Republican Governors did MUCH BETTER than Ron and, because I allowed them this ‘freedom,’ never closed their States. Remember, I left that decision up to the Governors!”

Curiously, Mull rather quickly got over her initial apocalyptic response, tweeting just a couple of months later: Atlantic writer who warned of Georgia’s human sacrifice by reopening says New York’s 8 p.m. curfew is ‘absolutely insane.’

But then, many on the left forgot their obsession with lockdowns, when, to paraphrase Martha and the Vandellas, the summer of 2020 was here, and the time was right for rioting in the street.

I’LL TAKE HEADLINES FROM 2020 FOR $500, ALEX: Trump’s second term seems inevitable.

Face it: Biden isn’t that popular as world leaders go. In their respective countries, Narendra Modi (India), Andrés Manuel López Obrador (Mexico), Anthony Albanese (Australia), Lula (Brazil) and Giorgia Meloni (Italy) are all better liked. If you look at Biden’s job approval, using the RealClearPolitics average, he is now slightly more unpopular (a net approval of minus 11.6 percent) than Trump was at this stage in his presidency (minus 10.7 percent).

Trump is also not that unpopular. Indeed, he is less so than at this point eight years ago. In July 2015, Trump’s net unfavorable number was minus 39.3 percent. Today, it’s minus 16 percent. Then, just 23 percent of voters had a positive view of him. Now it’s 39 percent. The RealClear figure for Joe Biden is 41 percent, and his net unfavorable is minus 12 percent.

And that’s the state of play at the moment. But what if there’s a recession between now and next year? It’s not a certainty. There is more than one smart economist who still believes there could be a “soft landing,” despite all the recent worries sparked by US (and Swiss) bank failures. In an interview with CNBC, Apollo Global Management’s chief executive, Mark Rowan, even used the phrase “non-recession recession,” which we must hope doesn’t catch on.

On the other hand, former treasury secretary Larry Summers has had a pretty good run ever since he called the Biden administration’s inflationary fiscal mistake back in February 2021, and he said last week that there’s a 70 percent probability of a recession within the next year. He is not alone.

I’m with the bears. What we have witnessed over the past two years is an epic monetary policy failure. In June 2021, the members of the Federal Open Market Committee thought that the target federal funds rate this year would lie between zero and 1.75 percent. By March of this year, they had to revise those figures up to between 4.75 and 6 percent. Having been asleep at the wheel in 2021, they have cranked up short-term rates to try to bring inflation back down to 2 percent. But they are still a long way from achieving that.

As central bankers love to intone, monetary policy acts with long and variable lags. The current lag is taking longer than people appreciate. Recessions resemble slow chain reactions. The signal from the policy interest rate to the wider economy goes through multiple channels, but the most important is the volume of bank credit.

In the twelve months through March, total bank credit in the US economy declined in real terms. That rarely occurs. Since 1960, it has happened only during, or in the immediate aftermath of, a recession. This is the indicator to watch, along with the surveys of borrowers and lenders.

The deceptive indicators are those that track consumer behavior and the labour market, which still look strong. In the latest GDP print, consumption was still growing. But non-residential investment contracted. The present game of chicken over the debt ceiling makes a recession more likely. As in 2011, the showdown will probably be resolved at the last moment, within twenty-four hours of the “X-date” after which the Treasury must either slash public spending or default on some part of the federal debt. But the 2011 debt-ceiling crisis took place during the sluggish recovery from the 2008 financial crisis, when inflation and interest rates were close to the zero lower bound. The risk of a bond market accident is much higher today.

What this suggests to me is that Joe Biden is in serious danger of following Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush into the trashcan marked “one-term presidents.” Why? For the simple reason that no president since Calvin Coolidge a century ago has secured re-election if a recession has occurred in the two years before the nation votes. It does not need to be as severe as the Great Depression that destroyed Herbert Hoover’s presidency. A plain vanilla recession will suffice.

In the wake of the 1976 Republican convention, Ford was trailing his rival, Carter, by thirty-three points in the Gallup poll. His campaign did an extraordinary job of closing the gap, so that the result was tantalizingly close. But over the GOP, as the New York Times put it in its immediate post-election report, “hung the shadow of Richard M. Nixon and a dangerously shaky economy.”

In 1980, it was Carter’s turn to lose, in part because of “last-minute rejections of [his] handling of the economy,” in part because of the Iran hostage crisis. “Inflation and unemployment had been a constant drag on Mr. Carter throughout the race,” reported the New York Times. “The issue got new prominence when Mr. Reagan stressed it as he closed his argument in the debate in Cleveland by saying, ‘Ask yourself, are you better off than you were four years ago?’”

And in 1992, Bill Clinton ran on “the economy, stupid,” one of three points on a sign that his chief strategist James Carville hung in the campaign headquarters in Little Rock, Arkansas. (The others were “Change vs more of the same” and “Don’t forget healthcare.”)

If you think the economy isn’t going to be the issue in the 2024 election, I’ve got a Whip Inflation Now badge to sell you. Look at the Gallup poll on “satisfaction with the way things are going in the US.” That’s currently at the 1980 level, half what it was four years ago, before the pandemic. Gallup’s economic confidence index is deeply in negative territory, the opposite of where it was under Trump. And this is before any recession.

Whoever is running against Biden gets to play some variation on the “Worst economy in 50 years” tagline of Bill Clinton. But DeSantis can add a variation of Reagan’s trademark: “Are you better off than you were four years ago? Well, Florida residents aren’t. As to the rest of America…”

GERMAN GOVERNMENT LIED ABOUT NUCLEAR: Germany’s Economy and Climate Minister, a Green Party leader, lied about nuclear fuel rods.

The German government is moving forward with plans to close its last three nuclear plants this December despite Europe being gripped by the worst energy crisis in 50 years. Robert Habeck, Germany’s Vice Chancellor and Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, said there is no point in operating them because Germany lacks natural gas, not electricity.

“Nuclear power doesn’t help us there at all,” Habeck said on Tuesday. “We have a heating problem or an industry problem, but not an electricity problem — at least not generally throughout the country.”

Besides, Habeck said, only Russia could provide Germany with the uranium fuel rods required to keep the nuclear plants operating, and there was no way to make sure the plants would be able to operate safely.

But none of what Habeck said was true. Coal, natural gas, and nuclear energy all generate electricity. Less nuclear means using more of coal or natural gas, which is why the German Cabinet, led by Habeck, just approved burning more coal.

As for safety, the leading provider of nuclear safety testing said Germany’s nuclear plants could keep operating safely after December. “The plants are in a technically excellent condition,” said Joachim Buehler, managing director of TUEV. Buehler said that an extensive check, which is usually done every decade, could instead be done within a few months.

Good and hard, Germany: German residents make plans amid fears of a winter gas shortage.

INFLATION ROSE TO 6.2% IN OCTOBER, THE HIGHEST ANNUAL RATE IN 30 YEARS.

As Brad Polumbo notes in the Washington Examiner, “Citizens upset over inflation should not look at Congress but at the Federal Reserve, the central bank that controls U.S. currency:”

“While the rate of inflation might differ from year to year due to aggregate supply or demand shocks, the long-run trend rate of inflation is ultimately determined by monetary policy,” economist William J. Luther told me in a recent interview . “The [Federal Reserve] can control inflation.”

To “stimulate” the economy amid the COVID-19 crisis, the Fed engaged in a massive expansion of money supply — basically, it (digitally) printed a bunch of new money. As my Foundation for Economic Education colleague Peter Jacobsen, an economist, has explained , “If more dollars chase the exact same goods, prices will rise.”

* * * * * * * *

Ultimately, rising prices of this magnitude represent a grave problem for millions of families. The temptation will be to blame President Joe Biden, who certainly has played at least some small part in this concerning trend. Yet, we won’t solve this problem until we concentrate our criticism on the real culprit behind our inflation malaise: the Fed and its reckless monetary policy.

In any case, MSNBC assures me this is quite a good thing.

But wait — the worst is yet to come: If You Think Inflation Is Bad Now Just Wait Until The Winter.

RINGING IN THE NEW YEAR WITH A RECESSION?

If the economy goes into recession in 2019, President Trump may well relish having the Democratic-controlled House to blame. It’s unlikely that House Democrats will have much ability to influence U.S. economic policy, other than blocking any new initiatives from the Trump administration. But the timing for them would be pretty bad — they step into the new majority and the economy suddenly slows on their watch.

No doubt Trump would exploit that calamity for political gain; just as we know the left would never let such a crisis — or non-crisis — go to waste.

OBAMA’S LEGACY: Worst GDP in 50 years, stagnant wages, poorer health. “Now they tell us. A new report on the economy finds that productivity growth is at a 50-year low and that much of the positive talk about the nation’s financial situation in the last election, much of it coming from the administration, was a lie.”

LAWRENCE SUMMERS EXPLAINS THE NEW NORMAL ANEMIA: The global economy has entered unexplored, dangerous territory.

The International Monetary Fund’s growth forecast released just before the meeting was once again revised downward. While recession does not impend in any major region, growth is expected at rates dangerously close to stall speed. Worse is the spreading realization that the central banks have little fuel left in their tanks. Recessions come intermittently and unpredictably. Containing them generally requires 5 percentage points of rate cuts. Nowhere in the industrial world do central banks have anything like this kind of room, even allowing for the effects of unconventional policies such as quantitative easing. Market expectations suggest that it is unlikely they will gain much room for years.

Summers adds that “It can hardly come as a great surprise that when economic growth falls short year after year, and when its beneficiaries are a small subset of the population, electorates turn surly.”

In this country, the regulatory state has never been so intrusive or capricious, entitlements and disability payments dwarf the Great Depression’s New Deal, deficits are set to explode again even without a recession, and our public debt is at levels unprecedented without a global war. Perhaps worst of all, not even nine trillion in new debt and a multitrillion dollar expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet could buy us a “recovery” with GDP growth close to the postwar average.

That’s some bad luck making voters so surly.

WELCOME TO FANTASY ISLAND:

“Obama Takes Credit For ‘Saving the World Economy From a Great Depression,’” Tom Blumer wrote yesterday at NewsBusters. “At a townhall in London, Obama was asked: ‘After eight years, what would you say you want your legacy to be?’ Here was his response, as it related to the ‘world economy,’” Blumer writes, quoting the semi-retired president telling his London audience:

There are things I’m proud of. The basic principle that in a country as wealthy as the United States, every person should have access to high-quality health care that they can afford — that’s something I’m proud of, I believe in. (Applause.) Saving the world economy from a Great Depression — that was pretty good. (Laughter and applause.)

The first time I came to London was April of 2009, and the world economy was in a free fall, in part because of the reckless behavior of folks on Wall Street, but in part because of reckless behavior of a lot of financial institutions around the globe. For us to be able to mobilize the world community to take rapid action to stabilize the financial markets, and then in the United States to pass Wall Street reforms that make it much less likely that a crisis like that can happen again, I’m proud of that.

Ahem:

Listen to the president and one would think that he was in office during the financial crisis that began on September 15, 2008. For the nth time, Obama reminded the nation on 60 Minutes of the financial meltdown he inherited. That is his usual way of suggesting to the American people that they could hardly hope for normal times after six years of his own governance. In truth, Obama entered office on January 20, 2009 — over four months after the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that precipitated a general financial meltdown.

One would not expect Obama to fault past liberal congressional intervention in the financial sector that in large part forced the issuance of subprime risky mortgages, much less the earlier deregulation of the financial industry under Bill Clinton that helped fueled the rampant speculation. The videos of the sad congressional banter about supposedly insensitive questioning of the duplicitous and corrupt Fannie head Franklin Raines, or the self-important bluster of former Rep. Barney Frank, make a good 10-minute tutorial on the meltdown — namely how Wall Street sharks, hand-in-glove with liberal congressional operatives and Clinton appointees, offered federally “guaranteed” mortgages to those who had no ability to pay them back, fueling a phony real estate boom and overvalued stock market.

Obama might at least admit that when he entered office the panic had largely passed. The tools needed to deal with it that he embraced had months earlier been implemented by someone else. Indeed, Obama was president for just a few months before the recession that began in December 2007 ended in June 2009 — well before the effect of any of the policies, good or bad, could have taken effect.

Our current economic mess — the worst post-recession recovery since World War II, more people out of work than when Obama took office, a steady decline in real family income, massive new debt — is largely a result of his own policies of five consecutive $1 trillion deficits, the Obamacare catastrophe, new burdensome and capricious regulations, near-zero interest rates, and the anti-business psychological climate brought on by constant hectoring of the “you did not build that” and “at a certain point you’ve made enough money” sort.

—“Welcome to Fantasy Island,” Victor Davis Hanson October 5, 2014.

As Blumer concluded his article yesterday:

After setting up the conditions in February 2009 for an extended recession and historically weak recovery in the U.S., the idea Obama went to Europe two months later in April and then began “saving the world” is a sick joke only gullible, economics-ignorant reporters and leftists could possibly believe. Sadly, they’re the ones who still primarily control the news and other key institutions, so we’ll probably be hearing this crap for years on end — just like we’ve had to put up with the fiction that Franklin Delano Roosevelt saved the country from the Great Depression in the 1930s. The truth is that he lengthened it by seven years.

It took decades to overcome the all-encompassing myth created by leftist historians that FDR magically “saved” the economy in the 1930s. At least FDR’s rep was salvaged by winning World War II; in contrast, the scrotal-torque level of spin from Obama’s palace guard media and historians in the coming years will be staggering to watch – and push back against.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Faking Medical Conditions To Fly First Class?

Thirteen years ago, the University of California changed its ban on flying business or first class on the university’s dime, adding a special exception for employees with a medical need.

What followed at UCLA was an acute outbreak of medical need.

Over the past several years, six of 17 academic deans at the Westwood campus routinely have submitted doctors’ notes stating they have a medical need to fly in a class other than economy, costing the university $234,000 more than it would have for coach-class flights, expense records show. . . .

The UCLA officials added luxury and comfort to their travels while the UC system underwent one of the worst funding crises in its history. Undergraduates have seen tuition and fees increase nearly 70 percent since the 2008 school year.

Overall, Chancellor Gene Block and 17 deans who oversee the schools of business, film and theater, law, medicine and others spent about $2 million on travel and entertainment from 2008 to 2012. About half a million went to first- or business-class airfare for the six deans with medical exemptions, according to documents.

I don’t think UCLA is exceptional in this regard.

HOW’S THE ECONOMY? Reader Ross Zelman writes:

If you want to get a picture of how bad the US & world economy are doing, ask your readers to describe their holiday travel abroad. I’m in Aruba right now (having a great family vacation). This is our seventh trip in eight years; we’ve been timeshare owners for half that time. We aren’t experts in any sense, but simple observation and inquiry shows that hotels are at less than 50%, hotel staff are reduced, planes are flying less frequently and at less than full occupancy, restaurant reservations are easy to come by and fellow travellers are looking at the empty lounge chairs next to them and all agreeing that things are even worst than in 2001. If optional travel is a leading indicator, the economy is going to retract faster than we even realized.

Just thought that with your blog, you could get a quick taste of locations that Americans are traveling to around the world. Or not.

Got anything to report out there? There were plenty of cars on the road today, and as I mentioned earlier, New York didn’t seem slow. On the other hand, we got extremely good deals on our hotel stays, and New Yorkers told me that things were, in fact, slower than last year.

UPDATE: Reader Matt Johnson emails: “Over Thanksgiving we stayed at a resort in Aspen that is normally $550/night. Our price on Priceline was $160. I asked the front desk and they said normally thanksgiving is booked six months in advance and Christmas over a year in advance (Christmas still had plenty of capacity at that time).”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader John Kingston emails: “Last week, I had breakfast at the Marriott in Philadelphia on Market Street. This is the chain’s main hotel in the city, and it sits right in the center of it all. On other visits, the lobby was always a beehive of activity. I sat down to breakfast with my guest, and we talked for about 10 minutes before the waiter came along. He asked us if we wanted to order. I said we’d just have the buffet. He said there was no buffet, and I commented that I’d never been to a hotel like that without a buffet. The reason? Occupancy the night before was 9%. Nine!! (This according to our waiter). And this was still in the middle of a relatively normal business week, not the week of Christmas itself.”

MORE: From Northridge, New Jersey, Fred Rabinowitz writes: “Went shopping at Garden State Plaza (Paramus, NJ) with my daughter the other night. The mall itself was very busy. Macy’s was filled with customers. Nordstrom’s had few.”

Reader Jason Mart emails: “My family is in Telluride for a long planned ski reunion trip. Telluride has the best snow in decades (7+ feet in December) and the town is at about 40 -50% of normal for Christmas week. Lift lines are never more than 30 seconds, restaurants that normally would require a week in advance reservation are available for walk ins with immediate seating, real estate deals abound, in short, many area business owners will simply not make it. This is their high season and it is a total bust.”

Reader Jeff Benkel writes:

I’m spending this week in a timeshare next to the Heavenly ski resort in Lake Tahoe. Before this year, trading for Christmas week in Tahoe would be absolutely unthinkable. The complex appears to be less than half full. Of the three poker rooms I’ve visited (my kids love to ski but I hate snow), two had only one game going, the other had three tables for a tournament they usually have to limit to 8.

Separately, as an alumni of THE Ohio State University living in Phoenix, I was worried about being able to secure a ticket to this year’s Fiesta Bowl to see the Buckeyes play Texas in my backyard. My family owns a restaurant where we have an OSU banner hanging. Seeing the banner, we’ve been offered tickets at least 5 times already, but it was no problem getting seats straight from the OSU box office. My friends in Columbus tell me that they’re hearing reports that Texas has sold only 1,000 of their 17,000 ticket allotment.

Ouch. Bad news, if true. Reader Dale Russelll writes:

I attended a urology meeting in Scottsdale recently. The organizers also put on a winter urology conference in Vail each year. The director of the conference in Scottsdale was encouraging attendees to also go to the winter conference as well, pointing out that the hotel that last year had cost $550
a night was offering a block of rooms at only $250 a night this year. The rack rate for that hotel is shown as $450 to $1790. (Still think it is expensive, even at $250)

And James Yeomans emails: “Every year my wife and I take the kids out of school for two weeks and go to the Caribbean right around Christmas. We both have long-term employment and actually had a good year earnings-wise (certainly not 401k-wise), but we are waiting until the end of the first quarter ’09 to make any vacation plans. This ‘wait and see’ approach has got its merits, for sure; I wonder how many others are in the same boat as us?”

Yes, travel seems to be hardest-hit — restaurants, etc. still seem to be doing fine as best I can tell from my unscientific survey. Makes sense: Travel’s easiest to cut back on, and they’ve made it more miserable every year anyway. At least, unless you’re Michael Bolton!

What does all this anecdotal reportage mean? Hard to say — there’s a slowdown, but how much of it is psychology and how much of it is fundamental? And how much is people holding out for better deals? I guess we’ll see.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Julie Carlson writes:

Hi Glenn – I live in a fairly prosperous suburb of San Francisco. Saturday night my husband and I visited an upscale Italian restaurant in a nearby shopping area and the place was packed. We noticed quite a few larger parties (20 people +) that looked like company holiday celebrations to us. After dinner we walked down the street to buy a gift card at Williams Sonoma. We had to stand in line for 10 minutes! And this was at 8:50 pm. Thankfully neither one of us believes the media’s “Great Depression” theme and clearly none of the shoppers did either. Yes, I know things are tough – we’ve definitely cut back on luxury-type purchases and are eating at home much more than in the past. But we are hardly at soup line status in the Bay Area.

Good to hear! Leora Amdur writes:

The oddest thing I’ve noticed is that many people are looking to rent apartments between Thanksgiving and Christmas – usually leasing offices are deader than dead except for folks planning to move after the New Year, but our company’s leasing offices have been getting a lot of folks who want to move in within a day or so. I have no idea what it means.

In my home territory of Long Island NY the parking lots are full at all the malls and the lines at MicroCenter are long with folks buying computers and big screen tvs. Best Buy seems a lot quieter than normal.

Well, Best Buy tends to suck. And Clark Mercer reports:

For what it’s worth, just got back from a 10 day trip to Belize. Throughout the trip, I was told that hotels, etc. were way down, in addition to restaurants and flights. One restaurant owner said over the past year, monthly revenue has been down about 25%, but the past two months down 50%. Not a lot of people on the beaches, tours of Mayan ruins, etc. which was great for us, but was told a few times in polite fashion that “my economy is not doing so well.” Apparently Americans makes up about 80-90% of the visitors to the country.

Well, they’ll be appreciaed more, now!

NBC NEWS: BIDEN ‘RATTLED’ BY POLLING, ANGRY HE’S NOT GETTING ENOUGH CREDIT. Link safe; goes to Guy Benson of Townhall:

(3) This is highly sympathetic spin that is ultimately self-defeating:

Any assessment of Biden’s performance needs to take into account the epic challenges he faced from the start. “They came in with the most daunting set of challenges arguably since Franklin D. Roosevelt, only to then be hit by a perfect storm of crises, from Ukraine to inflation to the supply chain to baby formula,” said Chris Whipple, the author of a book about White House chiefs of staff who is now writing a book about the Biden presidency. “What’s next? Locusts?” Biden wonders the same thing. “I’ve heard him say recently that he used to say about President Obama’s tenure that everything landed on his desk but locusts, and now he understands how that feels,” a White House official said.Biden inherited problems, as every president does. Of course, his argument to voters was that he and his team would fix them, by dint of their competence and doing the opposite of Donald Trump.  He wanted this job.  He got it.  On a number of fronts, from COVID to the economy, to immigration, he could have achieved better outcomes my simply doing nothing, or close to it.  He also inherited COVID vaccines (despite false White House claims), an economy just waiting to rebound, and some successful illegal immigration mitigation policies.  He and his team have mismanaged pandemic-related spending, harmed millions of students by bowing to teachers unions’ fake science, overheated the economy with inflationary spending that some Democratic economists warned against, and turbocharged the border crisis.  Afghanistan was another self-inflicted disgrace, the sheer incompetence of which may have informed Vladimir Putin’s miscalculation in Ukraine.  Wondering aloud about outside forces like the plague is embarrassing.

Read the whole thing. If that language of “the most daunting set of challenges arguably since Franklin D. Roosevelt” quoted above feel like deja vu, that’s not surprising, since it’s a classic bit of Democrat spin — George H.W. Bush’s mild recession of ’91-’92 was described as “The worst economy in 50 years” by candidate Bill Clinton’s campaign, to cast Papa Bush as the reincarnation of Herbert Hoover. Time magazine portrayed incoming-President Obama as FDR for their November 24th, 2008 cover, with the headline, “The New New Deal.”

And speaking of Obama, as Noah Rothman of Commentary writes, “Consciously or otherwise, the Biden administration is channeling the Obama White House’s self-indulgence:” Joe Biden’s Presidency Reaches the Self-Pity Stage.

“Now, let’s face it,” Barack Obama told a group of Democratic donors at roughly the same point in his presidency, “this has been the toughest year and a half since any year and a half since the 1930s.” In public and private, the former president regularly lamented the circumstances that befell his presidency—from the ploddingly slow economic recovery to the rise of ISIS in the Middle East. In his own telling, Obama was a victim of circumstance. His pursuit of higher tax rates, support for a burdensome regulatory environment, and the ill-considered withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq failed to earn him sufficient praise.

The former president bristled at the GOP’s critique of his administration’s profligacy. “It’s like somebody goes to a restaurant, orders a big steak dinner, martini, and all that stuff, and then just as you’re sitting down, they leave and accuse you of running up the tab,” Obama told another group of donors. The blame for America’s ballooning debt, which just about doubled under his watch, could be laid at the feet of structural forces, reckless actors in the private sector, and, of course, Republicans. Obama and his team convinced themselves that they could talk Americans into believing their objectively unenviable economic circumstances weren’t that bad after all. Biden’s team seems to have bought into the same myth.

Obama was similarly ill-served by his staff. When the president declared that “the private sector is doing fine” in the summer of 2012 (only to later admit that “the economy is not doing fine”), Obama’s  staff did their best to suggest the president had not said what the nation heard him say. From “you didn’t build that” to Obama’s “hot mic” moment confessing to nominal Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he would have “more flexibility” in his second term, the president’s aides (and much of the journalistic establishment) were quick to “clean up” and “contextualize” those remarks. Before White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain was the subject of much second-guessing, it was Rahm Emanuel who was failing the president.

Every president inherits a set of circumstances, some of which are more advantageous than others. Every president encounters unforeseen challenges. Every president is opposed by the party out of power. And although Biden has a unique talent for malapropisms, every president relies on his communications staffers to mop up after a gaffe or misstatement. The Biden White House isn’t uniquely beset by the forces of history. Indeed, so much of what the president and those in his orbit resent are conditions they either contributed to or incepted into existence.

As Ace of Spades notes, “The magnitude of Joe Biden’s failures is now so large that even Joe Biden is beginning to grasp it. That’s how big a thing this is. Even f’n’ Joe Biden gets it now. He now realizes that the midterms will be a historic repudiation, and that 2024 will probably be one as well. And that he will go down as a worse President than Jimmy Carter. So that means it’s time for Pre-criminations. It’s time for Joe Biden to start trashing his staff and blaming them for his failures.”

Exit quote:

WELCOME BACK, CARTER: Inflation Hits 30-Year High According to This Key Metric.

Left-leaning media coverage has in recent weeks pushed the narrative that inflation is fading. But shocking new inflation numbers released today blow that media spin to smithereens.

The Labor Department just released the latest Personal Consumption Expenditures index (PCE), which is the Federal Reserve’s preferred metric for monitoring inflation. It shows a 4.3 percent rise in consumer prices from August 2020 to August 2021, with prices rising 0.4 percent last month alone. That’s the biggest annual surge recorded since January 1991—roughly three decades ago.

1991, you say? I remember another Democrat who dubbed that era “the worst economy in 50 years.” Presumably Mr. Biden’s competitors to the White House will be using similar language to gauge his own handling of the economy.

Flashback: Milton Friedman’s Revenge.

WELCOME BACK, CARTER: Key inflation gauge rises 3.6% from a year ago to tie biggest jump since the early 1990s.

An inflation measure the Federal Reserve uses to set policy rose 3.6% in July from a year ago, meeting Wall Street expectations but also tying the highest level in about 30 years.

The core personal consumption expenditures price index, which the Fed sees as the broadest measure of inflation, was unchanged from June, which was revised up one-tenth of a percentage point, the Commerce Department reported Friday. That 3.6% reading equaled the Dow Jones estimate and appeared to be the highest level since May 1991.

1991, you say? I remember another Democrat who dubbed that era “the worst economy in 50 years.” Presumably Mr. Biden’s competitors to the White House will be using similar language to gauge his own handling of the economy.

Flashback: Milton Friedman’s Revenge.

THE MEDAL OF FREEDOM IN ECONOMICS:

At the Medal of Freedom presentation, President Trump offered a remarkable glimpse of what he himself is like as a person. It belies the notion that he is but a showman with scant appreciation for ideas. He described the Laffer Curve in detail and spoke of Mr. Laffer’s early work for Governor Jerry Brown of California, as well as President Reagan. Mr. Trump disclosed that he had studied the Laffer Curve, and over the years has heard it discussed at Wharton.

Mr. Laffer spent his remarks acknowledging an array of colleagues and collaborators. Among those at the ceremony were Vice President Pence, Steve Forbes, Larry Kudlow, Steve Moore, and others who played roles what is known as the supply-side revolution. Several figures now gone — Jack Kemp, Robert Bartley of the Wall Street Journal, and Jude Wanniski — were also named. All the more remarkable is the staying power of the supply-side ideas.

Robert Bartley’s The Seven Fat Years and How to Do It Again was a powerful and timely piece of contrarianism during that brief period the DNC-MSM dubbed “the worst economy in 50 years,” only to announce — in December of 1992, after the election — that the recession had ended prior to the fall of 1992. Or as a December 7th 1992 Time magazine headline noted with full snark, “Bush’s Economic Present for Clinton.”

THE REAL HISTORY OF THE LIBERAL MEDIA AND GEORGE H. W. BUSH.

One of my favorites was the DNC-MSM, in lockstep with their candidate Bill Clinton, pummeling Bush in the run-up to the 1992 election over a minor recession that Clinton described as “the worst economy in 50 years,” only to turn around and reveal that, as the Charlotte Business Journal wrote in 2010, “The U.S. economy actually grew 4.2% in the fourth-quarter that year and went on to enjoy a terrific decade-long run of prosperity. And we learned in hindsight that recession had actually already ended when the [September 1992 Time magazine] article was printed.” Time described it in December of that year as “Bush’s Economic Present for Clinton.”

Or as Jim Treacher once said:

U.S. JOURNALISTS LESS SATISFIED, SEE NEGATIVE TREND, reports Agence France-Presse:

American journalists have become increasingly dissatisfied with their work and see the industry moving in the wrong direction, a new survey shows.

The Indiana University survey, which follows up on research first conducted in 1971, found that as newsrooms are shrinking, journalists see themselves having less autonomy and that job satisfaction is on the decline.

The 2013 survey shows that, compared with a decade earlier, “the updated demographic profile of US journalists reveals that they are now older on average, slightly more likely to be women, slightly less likely to be racial or ethnic minorities, slightly more likely to be college graduates (and) more likely to call themselves Independents politically.”

Released late last week, it found 59.7 percent say that journalism in the United States is headed “in the wrong direction.”

The median age of full-time US journalists increased by six years from 2002 to 47.

As Virginia Postrel has mentioned several times over the years, the Web-induced contraction of old media, coupled with journalists’ near-monolithically left-leaning politics, can sharply skew their reporting on other issues, particularly those which are economic-themed.

(more…)

SOME FINANCIAL ADVICE for the current unpleasantness. Not sure I agree with the Home Equity advice, but I like the Monty Python reference. And there’s this: “If you want to worry about anything, worry about your taxes. The worse this crisis gets, the more they will end up putting the taxpayer on the hook to prevent a meltdown.” Alas, yes.

The “don’t panic” advice is probably good, too. I remember the 1987 crash — I was working at a Wall Street law firm then — and people were scared spitless as stocks dropped something like 25% in one day. But it wasn’ t the end, and we’ve seen nothing like that drop so far.

UPDATE: Reader John Pranikoff emails:

I remember the 1987 crash vividly too. I was right in the middle of it, working as a derivatives trader for a large global bank. Yesterday market sold of sharply, but it didn’t bear the slightest resemblance to 1987. Trading was orderly, the market was down 4.4% vs. 25%, there were no trading halts, and there was plenty of liquidity- if you wanted to sell, there were bids, unlike on that day almost 21 years ago.

The left knows that its in their interest to make the current situation sound as dire as possible (shades of “the worst economy in 50 years”). They will try to paint this as a failure of the markets, but in reality its the result of government meddling in the mortgage markets.

On thing’s for sure. There will be a renewed emphasis on economic policy in the campaign. In that light, John McCain should read this editorial over at NRO and take it to heart. It offers some sound advice.

Yeah, and today the indices are all up a bit at the moment. I’m not saying things are rosy — in particular, there are lots of hidden problems like underfinanced public pensions and ballooning entitlement programs — but it’s not 1987, and even 1987 wasn’t a new Depression, though they tried to make it sound like one for a while. I’m actually more worried about inflation as a result of low interest rates and too many bailouts.

GREAT MOMENTS IN GASLIGHTING: Enjoy the ratio on this take from Axios. The comment section is 🔥:

Question:

What happened in March of 2020? https://t.co/PsAlF54N5u

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) January 18, 2024

If Axios wants to claim in 2024 that Trump was duped by Fauci and should have ignored his advice and kept the economy open, taken his cue from Sweden, and thus preventing a massive rise in unemployment, school closures, and possibly eliminating the summer riots or at least reducing their severity — have at it! But considering how conservatives were crucified for making similar arguments back then (both by the left and by Trump himself), please show us where they joined that chorus back in 2020.

Otherwise, this is an unintentional callback to Bill Clinton’s campaign in 1992, building upon G.W. Bush raising taxes in 1990, a year in which he was consumed by foreign policy decisions. A gesture that Clinton repaid by declaring the mild recession of 1991-’92 as “the worst economy in fifty years” and by running to Papa Bush’s right by excoriating him for violating his 1988 “read my lips” pledge.

MICHAEL WALSH: Virtue Über Alles.

Europe is in the middle of an energy crisis. Uncertainty over the flow of natural gas owing to Russia’s war in Ukraine has caused a spike in prices. The price of natural gas has soared to as much as $500 per barrel of oil equivalent, 10 times the normal average, fueling fears of winter shortages and cold homes.

Key commodities have already been affected. Fertilizer production, which requires large inputs of natural gas, is being shut down due to high prices. Manufacturers are hoarding glass in anticipation of future shortages. Climate change has made the situation worse, as a historic drought is drying up Europe’s rivers and cutting into hydroelectric capacity. The rising cost of energy has driven a spike in inflation in the United Kingdom, while Germany has suffered the worst inflation since the 1970s energy crisis.

What happened? The quote above from Foreign Policy partially explains how they got here (and, if things continue, the U.S. will not be far behind), but the real reason is: prosperity, combined with virtue-signaling neo-Luddism. The dreadful toll of death and destruction of the war, combined with the success of European reconstruction under the Marshall Plan, which saved the devastated economies of western Europe, left Europe with two debilitating by-products: the rise of pacifism as an anti-nationalist force and the abjuration of war as a means of foreign policy; and a false sense of economic security, under which they were free to chase their own chimeras of “soft power” and “progressive” living without any heed to reality.

The Europeans should have learned from their own history, but of course they never do. The Oxford Union’s “King and Country” debate of 1933, a fateful year in European history, turned out to be one of the high points of British pacifism. Having been bled dry by the Somme and other horrific battles in World War I, and also having lost the cream of their manhood in the process, the Union passed the motion that “this House would not in any circumstances fight for King and Country.” Winston Churchill who never saw a war he didn’t want to fight, knew that war with Hitler was unavoidable, and was aghast at the surviving, whinging chaff of England’s crop, the sons of the cowards, conscientious objectors, and those otherwise unfit to serve. Six years later, however, they were doing exactly that.

Related: Europe Going Dark Physically and Spiritually.

ROGER KIMBALL: Biden’s Debt Transference and Enforcement Arm.

I am not sure the Biden Administration has admitted yet whether the economy is in recession, but it is. And it is certainly suffering from inflation—or “Bidenflation” as some wags denominate it—the worst, we’re told, in 40 years. Gas prices have moderated a bit from their highs in May and early June, but they are still more than twice what they were when Biden took office, i.e., when Donald Trump was president, and everyone thinks prices will climb again this winter.

So, prices are rising, your money is worth less, and, oh, by the way, you have less of it. On Friday, the Dow-Jones Industrial Average lost just over 1,000 points, wiping out billions in value. And if the “Prosperity Reduction Act” (the real name of the inflationary “Inflation Reduction Act”) weren’t enough of a blow—raising taxes and weaponizing the tax farmers of the IRS—Biden has delivered another sharp jab to the solar plexus of the American taxpayer with his hare-brained student loan “forgiveness” scheme.

True, from time immemorial, the promise of debt forgiveness has been a powerful political gesture. But as has often been pointed out since the student loan subsidy was announced, Biden’s program is not really debt forgiveness. Rather, it is debt transference. That is, the debt doesn’t go away. It is just dropped in someone else’s lap. And that someone, Dear Reader, is you.

Flying monkey* Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) dramatized what is happening back in 2020 when, having touted the idea of forgiving students loans herself, she responded to someone who asked her if that meant he would be getting back the money he saved so that his daughter didn’t have any student loans. “Of course not,” was the squaw’s response. The moral of the story: “So you’re going to pay for people who didn’t save any money and those of us who did the right thing get screwed.”

Crisply put, that. Work hard. Save your money. Pay your debts. Then get saddled with someone else’s debts because you didn’t have the foresight to be improvident at the opportune moment.

Feel like a chump yet?

Biden might: Yikes! Yellen and Jill Biden advised him not to cancel student loan debt, but Joe listened to someone else.

* That’s a pretty racist thing to say about someone who was “Harvard Law’s ‘first woman of color'” — until she wasn’t: Elizabeth Warren in Iowa: ‘I am not a person of color.’

Speaking of whom, America’s Newspaper of Record “reports:” Harvard To Pay Elizabeth Warren $400,000 To Teach Class On Why College Is So Expensive.

“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.)

COAL MINE, MEET CANARY: Sri Lanka facing imminent threat of starvation, senior politician warns.

Sri Lanka is facing the imminent threat of starvation for its population of 22 million as the economic crisis in the country continues to worsen and food becomes increasingly scarce, a senior politician has warned.

Speaking in a debate in parliament, held against the backdrop of the worst financial crisis to hit the country since independence – and with anti-government protests spreading across the country – the speaker of the parliament, Mahinda Yapa Abeywardana, warned that this was “just the beginning”.

“The food, gas and electricity shortages will get worse. There will be very acute food shortages and starvation,” Abeywardana told the legislature.

The economic meltdown in Sri Lanka spiralled on Wednesday as the Sri Lankan rupee plunged to become the world’s worst-performing currency. Sovereign dollar bonds dropped to trade at deeply distressed levels, while the stock market fell a further 2%.

Over the past few months, Sri Lanka has been facing a dire financial crisis on multiple fronts, triggered partially by the impact of Covid-19, which battered the economy, as well as mounting foreign debts, rising inflation and economic mismanagement by the government, led by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa.

The country barely has any foreign currency reserves left, leading to dangerous shortages of food, gas and medicines as it is unable to import foreign goods, while people are enduring power blackouts of up to eight hours a day. The situation has pushed thousands out onto the streets in protest in recent days, calling for the resignation of the president.

Flashback: In Sri Lanka, Organic Farming Went Catastrophically Wrong.

Faced with a deepening economic and humanitarian crisis, Sri Lanka called off an ill-conceived national experiment in organic agriculture this winter. Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa promised in his 2019 election campaign to transition the country’s farmers to organic agriculture over a period of 10 years. Last April, Rajapaksa’s government made good on that promise, imposing a nationwide ban on the importation and use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides and ordering the country’s 2 million farmers to go organic.

The result was brutal and swift. Against claims that organic methods can produce comparable yields to conventional farming, domestic rice production fell 20 percent in just the first six months. Sri Lanka, long self-sufficient in rice production, has been forced to import $450 million worth of rice even as domestic prices for this staple of the national diet surged by around 50 percent. The ban also devastated the nation’s tea crop, its primary export and source of foreign exchange.

Get woke, go broke.

Related: Looming food shortages the next ‘slow-moving disaster’ to hit world .

WALL STREET JOURNAL: The Lockdown’s Destruction: Incredibly, some in the media want to repeat the second quarter’s 32.9% plunge in GDP.

Consumer spending fell 34.6% and accounted for some 25 percentage points of the GDP decline. The fall in transportation, recreation, food services and hotels was brutal. But the biggest surprise was the plunge in health-care spending during a health-care crisis. Health care represents about 12% of the U.S. economy and its collapse subtracted 9.5 percentage points from GDP.

How does that happen in a pandemic? The answer, as our friend Don Luskin points out, is that politicians panicked in March and waited for a surge of Covid-19 patients that the pandemic modelers told them would arrive. Blessedly, the modelers were wrong, and far fewer hospital and intensive-care beds were needed. But the economic harm from stopping all elective surgeries and barring visits to doctors was severe and unnecessary.

It was also a terrible public-health blunder. That harm will play out for years as Americans discover cancer, heart-disease and other diagnoses that were missed or delayed. . . .

Hard to believe, but some on the left are stumping for a second nationwide lockdown to control the virus. Shut the U.S. down again until October when the scourge will be gone for good. Do they want another 33% decline in GDP and 40 million more unemployed?

Without a vaccine, the virus was always likely to spread through most of the country, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicted in March. The lockdown-as-miracle-cure is a fantasy, as the World Health Organization has now acknowledged. The economic and public-health harm is too great and the virus is too easily transmissible.

The public is smarter than the media and can adjust its behavior when flare-ups occur. Hospitalizations and cases in hot spots in the South and West are trending down. They’ve fallen by a third in Arizona from a peak two weeks ago and are down 8% in Texas. Deaths have increased, but the rate is far below those on the East Coast in the spring.

At least the worst economic news is over, or it should be without a second lockdown. Orders for motor vehicles and capital goods are rising, and housing is strong. The service economy will take longer to come back, but it will do so when the public feels confident enough to venture out. What no one needs is another catastrophe like the second-quarter lockdown.

The WSJ is on-target, though the GDP drop is not an absolute 32.9% but an annualized rate. The actual drop for the quarter was much smaller, of course, though still huge. And it was pretty much all government-induced. Weirdly, when you force large parts of the economy to close down, the GDP drops.

PETER FERRARA: Economic Growth Is Not a Mystery, Yet It Eludes Democrats.

Obama fundamentally transformed America by following the opposite of every Reagan pro-growth policy:

Raised the top tax rate of every major U.S. tax, except the corporate rate, which was already the highest in the developed world;

Imposed draconian regulation on health care, finance and most importantly energy, just when America was emerging with the resources for energy independence to lead the world in production of oil, natural gas and coal;

Raised federal spending, deficits and debt to highest in American history by far;

Supported the Fed in wildly destabilizing monetary policy, with near zero interest rates for nearly a decade, and a flood of money held back by the Fed for now, which only further discouraged global investment in America.

This is why the economy never recovered from the 2008-09 financial crisis, and why instead we got the worst economic recovery from a Recession since the Great Depression, with only 2 percent economic growth. America’s historical record is that the worse the recession is the stronger the recovery, as the economy grows faster than normal for a couple of years to catch up to where it should be on the long-term trendline. That is why we should have come out of the financial crisis in a long-term economic boom, potentially stronger than even Reagan’s.

But to this day, eight years later, that still has not yet happened. Instead, we are still $2 to $3 trillion below where we should be.

This is why Democrats lost the 2016 election. Trump promised to restore Reagan’s pro-growth policies. Hillary promised more of the same Obama failure.

Democrats have yet to catch up with the rest of the world in realizing that socialism does not work. That Bernie Sanders’ throwback silliness continues to spread throughout the Democratic Party is costing it big time.

The difference between 4 percent real growth and 2 percent after 50 years is the difference between America and Third World stagnation.

They’ll turn us all into beggars ’cause they’re easier to please.

I’M OLD ENOUGH TO REMEMBER WHEN BARACK OBAMA SAID WE COULDN’T DRILL OUR WAY OUT OF OUR ENERGY PROBLEMS: American Shale Ready to Take On Petrostates.

The U.S. shale boom is back and better than ever. After weathering a collapse in crude prices that saw the value of a barrel of oil drop from more than $110 in June 2014 down below $30 in January 2016, American fracking firms (the ones that survived, that is) are looking fit once again. As Bloomberg reports, these companies are already taking advantage of a petrostate production cut that ceded valuable market share and pushed oil prices back above $50 per barrel. . . .

So now, nearly three years after a global glut sent oil prices into a tailspin and American oil producers to their nearest lenders, U.S. oil production is once again floating above 9 million bpd. And as positive as this is for both the American economy and our country’s energy security, it’s a major threat to oil-soaked states both inside and out of OPEC. Those petrostates banded together late last year to finally agree on a production cut, and they managed to induce a price rebound of roughly $10 per barrel as a result. Now, however, their worst fears are being realized: U.S. shale producers are seizing the opportunity and bringing rigs out of retirement.

I’m beginning to wonder if that Obama fellow knew what he was talking about.