Monday, August 14, 2017

I hate politics


Replying to Mark Thoma, I wrote:

Half a dozen years back there was so much right-wing chatter about the threat of inflation (from quantitative easing) that it seemed the chatters wanted hyperinflation, just to show they were right about the economy.

... It's not quite so bad these days, not yet at least, and I'm not sure it's only a left-wing phenomenon, but these days the chatter seems to be about impending recession.

Why would "impending recession" be a left-wing phenomenon?

Why, indeed. On the day after the Presidential Inauguration last January, Adam Ozimek was at Forbes with The Best Case For The Trump Economy. Ozimek is not a fan of Trump, as his concluding remarks indicate:

So if everything goes smoothly and Trump doesn't do anything crazy, or anything really, he could potentially keep the current pace of job growth running for a few more years and maybe even for the whole term...

If I was Trump, I'd do the absolute minimum policy-wise and make job #1 avoiding a recession.... I'd also probably change the hairdo.

Not a fan, but not so full of hate for the man that he can't do econ. Many people are.

Anyway, in the same article Ozimek says

If you look over the long-term, the employment to population rate falls during recessions then slowly recovers. So if we can avoid a recession, it's not crazy to think we could get back to 2000 levels.

I quoted that yesterday, talking about Trump's 4% growth target. Ozimek's point is that for Trump to succeed in making America's economy great again, he's going to have to avoid recession.

And there, right there, is the reason the chatter about impending recession is a left-wing phenomenon.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

"Half a dozen years back there was so much right-wing chatter about the threat of inflation (from quantitative easing) that it seemed the chatters wanted hyperinflation, just to show they were right about the economy."

My impression was they wanted hyperinflation so that they could sell their investment in gold to suckers and make a healthy profit. I based that conclusion on the advertisements I saw wherever those opinions were expressed.