politics

I just saw some bubbleheaded dumbass on Faux talk about how we have to "dig out from four years of Biden being feckless" or some such craziness.

I mean, I guess we should all thank our lucky stars that only a certain set of special people can see what a hot mess the Biden economy truly was, even if normal people could see all the stats for themselves...it must be a special vision they have, much like RFK being able to see "mitochondrial challenges" in others.

Also, if Kamala had won, we might have had a genocide in Gaza or something, I'm told, so there's that...

I don't trust a single goddamn thing that comes out of the pedo nazi's fascist regime.

I've noticed the same. But weirdly they are also building more industrial buildings, just in different areas. I assume because it's cheaper to build a new building than to deal with an old 40 year old one.

It's going to be a global quagmire. France is basically underwater and the EU probably isn't strong enough to bail them out. China still has property finance problems, even if they did a good job keeping it out of the news.

People have been doing something about it. That's what all the weird return to office intiatives were about. City governements are scared that the downtowns will spiral into collapse so they coerce all the companies that still have downtown offices to get their employees back and spending money at restaurants and such. If the restaurants go out of business and store fronts sit vacant, then there would be no reason for companies to pay a premium for downtown office space and the whole thing collapses Detroit style. Commercial real estate failed to price in remote work, and the covid shutdowns made it obvious just how overpriced and overleveraged it all was.

Biden was trying to get commercial property owners to convert empty office space into apartments, so that was an attempt to correct it.

Online shipping has been killing brick and mortar for years, and the pandemic stepped that into high gear.

There's a difference between stagflation of the 1970s and what's happening now.

In the economics of spherical chickens in a vacuum, stagflation should be impossible according to the Keynesian models. If people have jobs, they have money, and that causes inflation. If people don't have jobs, then they don't have money, and inflation should come down. They're counter-cyclical. A situation where you have high unemployment and high inflation shouldn't happen.

What they missed then was a single commodity--oil having a manipulated price due to OPEC--causing both high unemployment and high inflation.

The really big problem was what to do about it. The US wasn't able to strongarm OPEC into dropping oil prices. If the Fed were to raise interest rates, that would bring inflation down, but make unemployment even worse. Drop interest rates, and unemployment comes down, but inflation goes through the roof. What the Fed ultimately did under Volcker was to say fuck it, we're raising interest rates until inflation is under control, then back it off to bring unemployment under control. It was tough medicine, but it did work. Probably saved capitalism at a time when the Soviet Union still could have won the cold war. Not that the hardcore libertarian capitalists ever gave him credit for it.

The difference now is that we have a very clear reason why it's happening: Trump's tariffs. Unlike the situation with OPEC, the US has complete control over that factor. There would need to be negotiations with other countries to drop reciprocal tariffs, but since tariffs hurt in both directions, most are going to be amenable.

All we have to do is get rid of the insane idiot in charge of things.

I’m pretty old and had not heard of it. From Wikipedia:

The term arose from the economic recovery post the COVID-19 pandemic,

Liberals really didn't like leftists trying to point out the bad economy last year.

Good thing telling all the leftists to shut up and get in line worked so well...