The Slump Has Begun

We're entering into an era of what promises to be a shit storm of really bad news - one that dwarfs the daily shit storm generated by Cult45 these last few years.

NYT: (pay wall)

America’s growth streak is over: The economy shrank 4.8 percent, and the worst is yet to come.

The coronavirus pandemic has officially snapped the United States’ economic growth streak.

The questions now are how extensive the damage will be — and how long the country will take to recover.

U.S. gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services produced in the economy, fell at a 4.8 percent annual rate in the first quarter of the year, the Commerce Department said Wednesday. That is the first decline since 2014, and the worst quarterly contraction since 2008, when the country was in a deep recession.

Things will get much worse. Widespread layoffs and business closings didn’t happen until late March, or the very end of the last quarter, in most of the country. Economists expect figures from the current quarter, which will capture the shutdown’s impact more fully, to show that G.D.P. contracted at an annual rate of 30 percent or more.

Coupla things:

We're already hearing the externalizing excuses, ie: "COVID-19 caused all the problems, and China caused COVID-19".

I think the real story has everything to do with the bubble effect caused by the GOP's TaxScam17® - which drove hyper-inflation of Wall Street stock values because the companies spent their tax cut windfall on buybacks in order to boost their portfolios and capture more of the growth at the top of the earnings pyramid.

There was in fact some trickle-down (always is - that's what keeps that particularly monstrous "theory" alive), but for the most part, the bubble effect caused more immiseration of everybody earning below about $75K, and we're seeing what happens when the Consumer Demand which is the engine of the world economy, dries up.

COVID-19 has contributed to the downturn, and it's very likely to make things worse. But let's be clear - 45*'s failure to act quickly and decisively is what put us so deep in this fucking hole.

Irony is what happens when you make a desperate play to keep the economy propped up because that's the only thing that saves your re-election chances, but that play is precisely why you're about to get stomped on a scale of monumental proportions - even tho the GOP is working very very very hard to make sure it looks like a close one.

Don't get fooled - polling may show there's still some pretty strong support for 45*, but it's smoke and mirrors.

There's just no way it's real. You can't get a 45% overall approval rate for the guy when his numbers on handling of COVID-19 are in the shitter.