Biden's Economy?

The Off-Topic forum for anything non-LDS related, such as sports or politics. Rated PG through PG-13.
Vēritās
God
Posts: 1555
Joined: Sun Jun 12, 2022 2:51 am

Re: Biden's Economy?

Post by Vēritās »

Hawkeye wrote:
Thu Jul 14, 2022 10:39 pm
If we are in a recession, it will be confirmed after it ends. That's how it's done.
When the quarter ends and it's confirmed that we were and are in a recession (2 consecutive quarters of economic contraction) Kamala Harris will say that the new data doesn't account for the 20 cents that gasoline dropped, so maybe we're already out of the recession and don't know it yet.

Jam tomorrow and jam yesterday, but never ever jam today.
That's not the definition of a recession.

Gasoline has dropped over $.40 cents since you began whining that it barely crossed $5. Gasoline is also "not at record highs" when you adjust for inflation:
gas.inflation.jpg
gas.inflation.jpg (49.89 KiB) Viewed 361 times
The economy has already surpassed pre-pandemic levels:
gdp.jpg
gdp.jpg (76.83 KiB) Viewed 366 times
Real gross domestic product (GDP) decreased at an annual rate of 1.6 percent in the first quarter of 2022, following a massive increase of 6.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2021. Quarterly projections are based on a percentage of the preceding quarter.
"I am not an American ... In my view premarital sex should be illegal ...(there are) mentally challenged people with special needs like myself- Ajax18
Vēritās
God
Posts: 1555
Joined: Sun Jun 12, 2022 2:51 am

Re: Biden's Economy?

Post by Vēritās »

Ten of the last eleven US Recessions took place under a Republican administration. Remember this the next time someone tries to tell you Republicans are better for the Economy.

Year - Duration - President

Feb 2020 - 2 months - Trump (R)
Dec 2007 - 18 months - W Bush (R)
Mar 2001 - 8 months - W Bush (R)
Jul 1990 - 8 months - HW Bush (R)
Jul 1981 - 16 months - Reagan (R)
Jan 1980 - 6 months - Carter (D)
Nov 1973 - 16 months - Nixon (R)
Dec 1969 - 11 months - Nixon (R)
Apr 1960 - 10 months - Eisenhower (R)
Aug 1957 - 8 months - Eisenhower (R)
July 1953- 10 months - Eisenhower (R)

I think it is funny because for decades they've been using Carter as the textbook example for the worst President for the economy. Now the same lot of cackling hens are rooting for another recession just because the President has a (D) after his name.
"I am not an American ... In my view premarital sex should be illegal ...(there are) mentally challenged people with special needs like myself- Ajax18
Vēritās
God
Posts: 1555
Joined: Sun Jun 12, 2022 2:51 am

Re: Biden's Economy?

Post by Vēritās »

Avg gas price has dropped $.70 cents in just six weeks. Republicans are frantically scrambling to figure a way to spin this as a bad thing.

Gas Is Less Than $4 a Gallon in 11 States. How Much Lower Can It Go?
"I am not an American ... In my view premarital sex should be illegal ...(there are) mentally challenged people with special needs like myself- Ajax18
Hawkeye
2nd Counselor
Posts: 401
Joined: Tue Aug 03, 2021 1:37 pm

Re: Biden's Economy?

Post by Hawkeye »

That's not the definition of a recession.
2 consecutive quarters of economic contraction is the definition of recession that has always been used. You're changing the definition now because by Thursday we'll know that we've had 2 consecutive quarters of economic contraction. The only hope Democrats have for saying that their policies do not lead to recession and stagflation is to redefine the term recession.
The best part about this is waiting four years to see how all the crazy apocalyptic predictions made by the fear mongering idiots in Right Wing media turned out to be painfully wrong...Gasoline would hit $10/gallon. Hyperinflation would ensue.
Veritas
User avatar
Res Ipsa
God
Posts: 9568
Joined: Mon Oct 26, 2020 6:44 pm
Location: Playing Rabbits

Re: Biden's Economy?

Post by Res Ipsa »

Hawkeye wrote:
Wed Jul 27, 2022 3:07 pm
That's not the definition of a recession.
2 consecutive quarters of economic contraction is the definition of recession that has always been used. You're changing the definition now because by Thursday we'll know that we've had 2 consecutive quarters of economic contraction. The only hope Democrats have for saying that their policies do not lead to recession and stagflation is to redefine the term recession.
Actually, although the two consecutive quarter definition is used in other countries, it has not officially adopted in the US. It’s decided by a panel of economists.
he/him
When I go to sea, don’t fear for me. Fear for the storm.

Jessica Best, Fear for the Storm. From The Strange Case of the Starship Iris.
User avatar
ajax18
God
Posts: 2717
Joined: Tue Nov 03, 2020 9:12 pm

Re: Biden's Economy?

Post by ajax18 »

Res Ipsa wrote:
Wed Jul 27, 2022 9:48 pm
Hawkeye wrote:
Wed Jul 27, 2022 3:07 pm


2 consecutive quarters of economic contraction is the definition of recession that has always been used. You're changing the definition now because by Thursday we'll know that we've had 2 consecutive quarters of economic contraction. The only hope Democrats have for saying that their policies do not lead to recession and stagflation is to redefine the term recession.
Actually, although the two consecutive quarter definition is used in other countries, it has not officially adopted in the US. It’s decided by a panel of economists.
Appointed by who?
And when the Confederates saw Jackson standing fearless like a stonewall, the army of Northern Virginia took courage and drove the federal army off their land.
User avatar
canpakes
God
Posts: 7062
Joined: Wed Oct 28, 2020 1:25 am

Re: Biden's Economy?

Post by canpakes »

ajax18 wrote:
Thu Jul 28, 2022 1:07 am
Res Ipsa wrote:
Wed Jul 27, 2022 9:48 pm
Actually, although the two consecutive quarter definition is used in other countries, it has not officially adopted in the US. It’s decided by a panel of economists.
Appointed by who?

From the last part of the linked page:

https://www.nber.org/business-cycle-dat ... -questions
Q: When did the NBER first determine its business cycle dates?

A: The NBER was founded in 1920, and published its first business cycle dates in 1929.

Q: When was the committee formed?

A: The committee was created by the President of the NBER in 1978. Robert Hall has chaired the committee since its inception.

Q: How is the committee's membership determined?

A: The President of the NBER appoints the members, who are experts in macroeconomics and business cycle research.

Who is the president of the NBER?

James Poterba, President and CEO
James Poterba is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the NBER and the Mitsui Professor of Economics at MIT. He is a past president of the National Tax Association and the Eastern Economic Association, a past Vice President of the American Economic Association, and a former Director of the American Finance Association. His research focuses on taxation, household behavior, and retirement security. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a trustee of the College Retirement Equity Fund (CREF), and a past trustee of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He studied Economics as an undergraduate at Harvard, and received a D. Phil. degree in Economics from Oxford University, where he was a Marshall Scholar.

Wait, how’d he end up there?

From 2008: https://www.nber.org/reporter/2008numbe ... -president
In February 2008, the NBER's Board of Directors selected James M. Poterba as the NBER's next President and Chief Executive Officer. He will succeed Martin Feldstein, who has led the NBER since 1977, and will assume the post on July 1, 2008. Poterba is currently the Director of the NBER's Program on Public Economics and the Mitsui Professor of Economics, and economics department head, at MIT.

Poterba began his association with the NBER in 1978, during his sophomore year at Harvard College. He was hired as a research assistant, working primarily with Martin Feldstein and Lawrence Summers on a range of projects involving capital income taxation. He also assisted NBER Research Associate Victor Zarnowitz in analyzing data collected as part of the American Statistical Association - NBER Survey of Economic Forecasters. Poterba went on to graduate studies at Nuffield College, Oxford, where he received a D.Phil. degree in Economics.

He was appointed an NBER Faculty Research Fellow in the Business Taxation and Finance Program in 1982, and promoted to NBER Research Associate in 1985. In 1989, he was selected to be the Associate Director of what by then had been renamed the Program on Taxation, working with inaugural Program Director David Bradford. In 1991, when Bradford was appointed to the President's Council of Economic Advisers, Poterba took over as Director of the newly renamed Program on Public Economics. He also assumed the editorship of the Tax Policy and the Economy series, a set of annual volumes containing the papers presented at an NBER conference in Washington that brings recent research in public economics to the attention of policy-makers.

During his time as Program Director for the Public Economics Program, Poterba has led a number of taxation-related NBER projects on such topics as: the International Comparison of Tax-Based Saving Incentives; Residential Real Estate; the Tax-Exempt Bond Market; Behavioral Responses to Taxation; and the Economic Analysis of Tax Expenditures. His own research has ranged widely across issues involving tax policy, financial markets, and retirement saving. His early work applied rational expectations insights about asset markets to analyzing how house prices and housing construction would be affected by changes in the tax treatment of owner-occupied housing. Throughout his career, he also has been interested in taxation and housing markets. Currently, he and Todd Sinai are studying how estimates of the tax expenditures for deductions of mortgage interest and state and local property taxes depend on assumptions about behavioral responses to income tax incentives.

Poterba has also explored issues in financial economics and corporate finance. He and Lawrence Summers collaborated on an influential study suggesting that the prices of many financial assets, including common stocks and currencies, exhibit mean-reverting tendencies. They also studied corporate dividend policy and the influence of dividend taxation on investment decisions, joining a long-standing public finance debate about the economic effects of dividend taxation.

For more than a decade, Poterba has collaborated with NBER researchers Steven F. Venti and David A. Wise on a series of projects investigating how tax-deferred retirement saving accounts, such as 401(k) plans, affect household balance sheets and preparation for retirement. Initially, they studied the degree of substitution between saving in tax-favored accounts and other forms of saving, and concluded that on balance 401(k) plans had increased private and national saving. Their later work has examined how the growing importance of defined-contribution retirement programs, such as 401(k)s, and the coincident decline in traditional defined-benefit pension arrangements, has affected the riskiness of retirement income for U.S. households. In their latest work, Poterba, Venti, and Wise are examining the role of housing equity in contributing to financial preparation for retirement.

Aside from two sabbaticals at Stanford, one as a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences and one as a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and a one-quarter visit to the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, Poterba has spent his entire 25-year academic career at MIT. He was appointed Mitsui Professor of Economics in 1996, and served as Associate Department Head, with a one-year sabbatical hiatus, between 1994 and 2006. He has been Department Head since 2006.

In 2005, Poterba served as a member of the President's Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform, a group that proposed systematic changes to the federal income tax. He is a former Executive Committee member for the American Economic Association, a former member of the Board of Directors of the American Finance Association, and the current First Vice-President of the National Tax Association.

Poterba is married to Nancy L. Rose, an industrial organization economist on the MIT Economics faculty who is also an NBER Research Associate and Director of the NBER's Program on Industrial Organization. They have three children, aged 18, 16, and 13, and reside in Belmont, Massachusetts.
Vēritās
God
Posts: 1555
Joined: Sun Jun 12, 2022 2:51 am

Re: Biden's Economy?

Post by Vēritās »

Hawkeye wrote:
Wed Jul 27, 2022 3:07 pm
That's not the definition of a recession.
2 consecutive quarters of economic contraction is the definition of recession that has always been used. You're changing the definition now because by Thursday we'll know that we've had 2 consecutive quarters of economic contraction. The only hope Democrats have for saying that their policies do not lead to recession and stagflation is to redefine the term recession.
No Ajax, that isn't the definition. This has been explained, but as it is with everything else, you absorb only that which is given to you by the fake news sites like Brietbart. And you cannot explain how a single "policy" let alone "policies" has led to negative growth. You also don't know what stagflation is if you're dumb enough to throw that out there. You seem like a petulant child, upset that none of his doomsday predictions have come to pass. First hyperinflation which never happened and now you think you know what stagflation is. In short, you cannot have stagflation with low unemployment. At some point the supply chains are going to be up and running at full speed and inflation will go down, and you're going to be pissed off about that. Virtually all economists agree that if we do go into a recession then it would be by design. The Fed hiking rates to lower consumer spending is the one thing it has been doing to curb inflation, and since day one many have been predicting a recession would be necessary to halt inflation in its tracks. That isn't a "policy" from Biden because unlike your orange autocrat, Biden doesn't control the Fed.

The fact is if we're in a recession it is one of the best recessions to be in. Record low unemployment, record wage growth, and inflation is because Americans keep buying crap which isn't indicative of a struggling society.

What is a Recession?
The NBER considers indicators including nonfarm payrolls, industrial production, and retail sales, among others, in designating the start and end of U.S. recessions, usually months after the peak and trough of the business cycle.
So let's go through these one at a time:

Nonfarm payrolls have been increasing at a record rate since Biden took office, and even during the recent slow down the past four months have seen monthly gains well above 350,000 all of which were more new jobs than in any month during the pre-Pandemic Trump administration.

Industrial production has reached record highs in 2022, hardly the sign of an impending recession.

Retail sales were at $594 billion in June, which is a $20 billion increase since January and it is higher than at any point during the Trump administration.

So can't you see why no one is calling this a recession? The only real negative is inflation caused by supply and demand issues, and that is the reason GDP dipped slightly into the negative. Because REAL GDP adjusts for inflation. Meanwhile, the economy is still expanding and GDP is reaching record highs.

Recessions are overwhelmingly felt by the general population, like when millions lose their jobs (2020) or their homes (2007), but right their primary gripe is gas prices which is just a product of the free market.
“The NBER would be laughingstocks if they said we had a recession when we were creating 400,000 jobs a month,” said Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “I can’t even imagine they would think for a second that we’re in a recession.”

Indeed, nonfarm payrolls grew an average 457,000 a month during the first six months of the year, hardly conditions associated with an economic downturn. Moreover, there are 11.3 million job openings and just 5.9 million available workers to fill them, indicating hiring should continue to be strong.
Last edited by Vēritās on Thu Jul 28, 2022 3:31 am, edited 2 times in total.
"I am not an American ... In my view premarital sex should be illegal ...(there are) mentally challenged people with special needs like myself- Ajax18
Vēritās
God
Posts: 1555
Joined: Sun Jun 12, 2022 2:51 am

Re: Biden's Economy?

Post by Vēritās »

Relevant... from Business insider

No, the White House isn't changing the definition of a recession
The National Bureau of Economic Research is the semi-official arbiter of when US downturns start and end, and its criteria are far more complicated than the two-quarters rule. The organization looks for a "significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and that lasts more than a few months" before calling a recession.

In other words, it takes a whole lot more than two quarters of negative GDP for the US to be in a recession. That hasn't stopped the topic from becoming a political battlefield. The White House took the first shot on July 21, publishing a blog by its Council of Economic Advisors that laid out several reasons why the country isn't in a downturn. Chief among them was the NBER's definition, but council members also cited strong job creation and industrial production as signs the economy was chugging along.
"I am not an American ... In my view premarital sex should be illegal ...(there are) mentally challenged people with special needs like myself- Ajax18
Hawkeye
2nd Counselor
Posts: 401
Joined: Tue Aug 03, 2021 1:37 pm

Re: Biden's Economy?

Post by Hawkeye »

and since day one many have been predicting a recession would be necessary to halt inflation in its tracks.
Was that what you and Janet Yellen meant when you were saying that inflation was only transitory a year ago?
The best part about this is waiting four years to see how all the crazy apocalyptic predictions made by the fear mongering idiots in Right Wing media turned out to be painfully wrong...Gasoline would hit $10/gallon. Hyperinflation would ensue.
Veritas
Post Reply