Devastating Damage from the Pandemic Is a Long Line of Bad News

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Devastating Damage from the Pandemic Is a Long Line of Bad News by David Haggith for The Great Recession

JPMorgan, has said it anticipates the fourth quarter will go slightly negative again. In which case, the final year-on-year figure will be lower than the graph above, leaving the annualized number in the first GDP graphs something of a phantasm that never fully materialized if we go into a second dip of recession as JP thinks likely.

US budget gone bust

Those unsettling results came with trillions of dollars in stimulus, which is now deadlocked in congress, and …

As Bloomberg notes, while the report makes clear that the economy has found a solid footing for now, analysts caution that growth will be much more modest and choppy in months to come, especially as the spread of the virus gathers pace again and lawmakers remain in an extended deadlock over a new stimulus package. Moreover, there are still nearly 11 million fewer workers on payrolls than there were before the pandemic hit, and analysts say a full recovery in GDP is at least several quarters away.

Zero Hedge

With congress and the presidency, itself, deadlocked in battle, the possibility of stimulus failing when most programs hit their end-of-year deadline intensifies. Their renewal in the next two months may depend on whether the current president and the current senate want to leave a scorched-earth policy for the new team or help set the new team up for success at a national recovery.

(One doesn’t have to remember back far to recall John Boehner’s warning to freshman congressman at the start of Obama’s first term that they had better not vote in favor of anything Obama proposed, even if it should be something they would normally like and think was a good idea for the country, lest Obama get the credit and gain another term, which was the final stroke in my coming to hate party politics on both sides altogether, for it is often party over country.)

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David Haggith

Knave Dave — vigilante against the false profits of The Great Recession Too many criminal CEOs still fill their porky bellies with the biggest taxpayer bailouts in the history of the world. These bailouts protect their reputations, saving them from the fall they should have taken. They continue to receive bonuses for having done an unparalleled job of destroying their companies! Many of their companies wouldn’t be making any profit at all if not for the interest they’re making off of nearly free government bailouts. Just this week Hewlett-Packard fired its CEO, but is still paying him a bonus of millions of dollars in exchange for a year of corporate wandering in the wilderness. Netflix’s CEO cost his company hundreds of thousands of subscribers and had to reverse his decision. Bank of America’s CEO launched a debit-card fee plan that was immediately stupid in the eyes of many, but greed an arrogance led him to think he could pass it by his customers, and he lost customers in droves and had to reverse his decision, as did the many major banks that followed him. Since these corporate leaders do things most of us can immediately see as being dumb, why are they rewarded with salaries a thousand times greater than many of us make?