Bending The Truth

It's Terrible When You See It In Real Time

If you want to understand why no one respects institutions or “elites” anymore, look no further than Janet Yellen. She went on television talk shows which are basically soapboxes for Democratic talking points and said that if the GDP numbers print negative this week, we aren’t in a recession.

She’s wrong. She knows it. Plus, she told a pretty big fib for a political spin and didn’t do it convincingly.

It undermines her credibility for anything she did as an academic and everything she does in the future. This is no different than Susan Rice’s lie on Benghazi. She is a political operative, period.

Rice is a better liar than Yellen. Yellen had the skill of a four-year-old.

Yellen abandoned any sense of objectivity when she ran the Fed. She is one of the people that politicized the position.

The definition of a recession accepted by all economists of all political and ideological stripes was 6 months of negative GDP growth. Period the end.

By the way, if you accept her “explanation”, and don’t hone to the definition you are simply a pawn. To have a functioning “republic”, the citizens cannot always be sheep. Jefferson famously said, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure”. He wasn’t talking about actual blood but dissent and rigorous debate. When something is obvious and truly a threat to liberty, you need to say something. The Biden Administration’s policies are a clear threat to liberty.

It’s not all about abortion. High taxes, high energy costs due to deliberate policy, a porous border, higher levels of government spending, and the aggressive use of the bureaucratic state combined with the aggressive use of the Department of Justice to persecute political rivals are a clear and present threat to the freedom of American citizens.

A crappy economy threatens freedom too.

When the Fed releases numbers on Thursday of this week, it looks like they will show that the US is in recession. The Atlanta Fed predicts a 1.6% decline in GDP which follows a prior 1.6% decline. That’s a recession and the cause is policy driven by the President of the United States and the people that work for him. They are incompetent.

The job numbers which Yellen cites are total deception. Of course, jobs have been improving. Duh. That’s what happens when you totally shut an economy down, pay people not to work with government transfer payments for an extended period of time, and then slowly stop those payments.

For what it’s worth, there is a lot of blood on the street in the tech world. Companies I am invested in have been able to hire super great people for positions that they were trying to fill.

I am seeing the President try to spin inflation too. “Gas is down 65 cents!”, he shouts from the mountaintop. Of course, it was at all-time highs and even with the decline of a paltry 65 cents, Americans are feeling the pain.

Sometimes reading economic tea leaves isn’t about high-level math, it’s just about common sense.

If the economic left wing wants to try and restore some shred of credibility reputable economists from the Keynsian top-down centralized school ought to call Yellen out. Joe Stiglitz would be good. But, I don’t think he has it in him.

Oh, and don’t let this short-term rally in the stock market fool you. The President’s people seem to be basking in it as if they have inflation licked and all the economic woes they created have gone away. Walmart's ($WMT) earnings gave Mr. Market the jitters this morning.