The Village Is Run by Idiots

The proof that we are run by idiots starts with Jerome Powell from last week. Following Powell’s Post-FOMC presser, believe it or not, we actually find even worse idiots in the news.

I pointed out Powell’s Mr. Magoo qualities in this past weekend’s Deeper Dive.

(In case you don’t know who’s Magoo…)

Magoo … er, uh, Powell … said he couldn’t see the “stag” in “stagflation,” and I commented that it’s a good thing he’s not a stag hunter (or he’d have its antlers up his behind by the time he sees it to shoot at it). The combination of GDP falling below 2%, new jobs falling and unemployment finally ticking up one click were all things we could expect him not to see because none of those statistics mean anything anymore.

Powell has had months now to figure out that labor is only tight because labor isn’t available. I presented several charts in the Deeper Dive to illustrate how obvious that has been for a long time, but Powell keeps thinking the only way labor could be tight is if the economy is zooming along and demanding lots of workers. That, I’ve been saying for a couple of years is the blind spot by which he’s going to lead us all into catastrophe just as Magoo leads everyone around him into catastrophe while he somehow escapes all the trouble he creates. Powell is proving my claim true by endlessly believing the labor shortage proves the economy is strong. If all the laborers in the nation fall over dead, is that the strongest economy ever just because it’s the tightness labor situation ever?

One graph I presented in the Deeper Dive shows how a large number of the economists who guide our financial leaders have seen inflation surprise them to the upside over over again for three full months while economic data has surprised them to the downside for just as many months. Out of 56 economists, all of them undershot where inflation would be this year. Obviously, this should tell them they are not looking at things correctly and need to seriously recalibrate. The gap between the two diverging lines in the graph is the measure of their blind spot. The name for that divergence is “stagflation”—rising inflation at a time of a falling economy. But nobody in leadership or advising the leadership sees it. The rest of us know it everyday, but Powell doesn’t see either the “stag” or the “flation.”

Harder to understand is how he missed the 16-24 times that each of its own Federal Reserve banks reported miserable economic results. Depending on which bank you look at, the various regions have been reporting non-stop recessionary data for up to two years, and Chicago Fed data have been in the recessionary zone for two-and-a-half years, except for a single quarter in the middle that leaped out of the recession zone!

Yet, Mr Monetary Magoo says he needs to see the data to believe it. Heck, they’re HIS data! The last two times the Fed’s own data looked as bad for as long as it has now, we were in the Covidcrash and the Great Recession! Yet, J-Pow says he just can’t see it, while his indispensable media parrots have been writing that they just don’t understand why everyone is complaining so much about the Biden economy when it is so strong and resilient! “Just look around,” they say. “Life has never been so good,” they say. That’s the village leadership talking.

Even though Powell claimed he couldn’t see the “flation,” every one of those Fed reports was filled with comments by business leaders saying that inflation was strangling them. I quoted some examples, and they leave you wondering what planet Powell is living on. Clearly, the rest of us are seeing it because consumer confidence has fallen for all of the last three months reported and is now at the recessionary level for its readings.

I summarized the consumer confidence report as follows:

So, we’re deep into the “stag’s” forest on that one. Expectations are, in fact, the lowest they have been since we started crawling up out of the Great Recession….

People haven’t felt this bad since the Great Recession, one of the worst recessions in a century with only the Great Depression having beat it out for the bottom of the pit of despair. Yay! What are all these grumbling people feeling so bad about? Don’t they realize all Biden has done for them? I can’t believe these ingrates. If they’re out of bread, let them eat hohos.

Excuse the sarcasm. It’s about the only way I can handle stupid when it comes to leaders who are not seeing what all regular folk are reportedly seeing quite clearly!

Just take a look at the morons running the village

It’s not hard to see why the Biden economy is so disdained by consumers. If you want proof of how robustly dense the Biden gang are, just listen to the boldfaced video in the links below from one of Biden’s lead economic advisors. Seriously! Listen to it. It’s just about the scariest video on our economic situation you will ever hear as Biden’s chief advisor parades his ignorance in neon lights! It’s so bad, I have to wonder if it is a deep fake.

This guy barely seems to know what a bond is and scarcely has a clue how the government makes its money. “You just turn on the printer, and there is money and it comes from well, somewhere, and then you can spend as much of it on anything you want because there is always more … so what are people worried about?” That is my paraphrase, but I only cleaned it up to make it shorter. Listen to the guy and one of the other advisors through the short video, and you’ll want to get your money out of banks by tonight! And he’s the chief of the president’s economic advisory panel!

Now, if you are finding relief by thinking the next president is going to lead us out of this mess, think again. Certainly Biden and his crowd are steering us for disaster; Powell hasn’t a got a clue because his glasses are actually made out of brown beer-bottle bottoms so not even transparent. However, if you listen to Trump in one of the other boldfaced articles, he’s actually convinced the reason Bidenomics is failing is because of the strong dollar. To achieve Trump’s solution, the Fed needs to loosen the economy more to weaken the dollar! Speed up the printers to weaken the dollar. That was what he constantly wanted Powell to do during his last term to make himself look good by having Powell run the economy as hot as possible. As he gets ready for his next term, he’s already trying to soften Powell up for that solution.

This is like stupid on steroids when inflation is already hot. According to what Trump says, he doesn’t believe there are enough jobs. Like Powell, he doesn’t see that up until now, at least, there haven’t been enough laborers left for the jobs that are out there. His solution, though he doesn’t know it, is to turn up inflation (weaken the dollar) in order to drive more imports so we can create more jobs for all those people that are no longer in labor pool. (I don’t know who else is going to do those extra jobs because many who ARE in the labor pool are already taking up 2-3 of the jobs that exist just to make ends meet, and there still aren’t enough workers!) Trump’s solution: Ignore inflation; get the money presses humming and take down the dollar so we can have even more excess jobs, resulting in more wage inflation.

Increasing jobs is not the way you get inflation down, but Trump is as unfeeling about inflation as Powell is blind to it because Trump doesn’t feel the impact of inflation. The only thing inflating fast enough for him to feel any pain is his legal expenses.

It couldn’t possibly enter any one of these leaders’ minds that the economy is weak because America quit working. A labor market that is tight due to badly weakened labor is not the hallmark of a strong economy.

How did the village become this idiotic?

Just read the final boldfaced article about the deterioration of the press, written by a veteran from the mainstream media about how horribly journalism is failing. Surprisingly (given the source), he’s saying what I’ve been complaining about for a long time — that the only thing left in journalism is cowardly mental wimps who just parrot whatever is fed to them by the Fed and feds. Someone in the mainstream press finally comes out and just says it!

He lays out the real reasons, versus the idea that they just suffer from flaccid braincells. There is no one in journalism holding anyone to task for anything, so they all get away with being idiots all the time. They are, in fact, pressed by financial powers to be stupid all the time, and he explains how that has happened. Thus, as I’ve noted recently, the government isn’t even trying any longer to hide the rigging in its numbers because it can rest assured “fourth estate” has become the “fifth column,” helping the leaders in perfect complicity with their task of defeating the nation they lead.

Recent headlines offer proof that the village is completely run by idiots as well as explanation as to why it is run entirely by idiots … all in the space of three short stories below.