The straight dope on recession

James Piereson:

“…In response to recent volatility in the stock market, rising prices (and declining yields) for U.S. Treasury bonds, and difficulties in the trade relationship between the United States and China, some pundits and politicians are forecasting a recession in the U.S., timed to coincide with the 2020 presidential election. The increasing volume of these forecasts is driven partly by partisan hopes that an economic slowdown gives Democrats the best opportunity to defeat President Trump next year. But hopes of this kind do not make for sound economic forecasts.

None of the major institutional forecasters is looking ahead to a recession in 2019 or 2020. The Conference Board, while recognizing risks to the economy, is still forecasting real GDP growth of 2.3 percent in 2019 and 2 percent in 2020. The International Monetary Fund, in a July report, forecasts global growth to expand to 3.5 percent in 2020, with the U.S. economy expected to expand at 1.9 percent. The most recent forecast of the Federal Open Market Committee calls for 2 percent growth in real GDP in 2020, compared with 2.1 percent in 2019. This is the conventional wisdom, to be sure, and such wisdom has often missed the mark, as we saw in 2007 and 2008. Nevertheless, these projections come from current economic indicators, none of which is signaling a recession in the months ahead.

The current economic environment—low and declining interest rates, stable prices, modest quarter-to-quarter economic growth, the absence of wars abroad—does not suggest a recession-oriented climate. In addition, the Federal Reserve Board has adopted a policy of stabilizing or lowering interest rates, another factor likely to reduce the odds of recession. Recessions typically occur in settings of rapid economic growth and rising interest rates, combined with overly bullish forecasts for stocks and business profits. That’s not the situation today…”

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Heather Mac Donald:

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The MSM goes predictably insane. I think it is an interesting idea.

Kurt Schlichter:

“…It’s always good to occasionally leave deep blue west Los Angeles and visit the United States. When your congressjerk is Ted Lieu, you get a skewed perspective on the country as well as suffer continuous embarrassment. My recent travels through parts of the country that aren’t populated and controlled almost exclusively by liberal nimrods gave me some hope for the future. America as a whole does not appear eager to become Scat Francisco. The problem is the people who want to transform our entire country into a socialist open sewer know nothing of this country outside their reeking pinko enclaves…”

And, talking about his hometown, Chambersburg, Pennsylvania:

“…History is not a hypothetical there. John Brown did some of the planning for the raid on Harper’s Ferry in C-Burg, and the Democrats burned it twice in the first civil war they provoked. Just up the road is Gettysburg, and visiting that battlefield with my grandmother (who had met veterans of that war) was one of my earliest memories. The problem is that this real American history, if it was ever learned by them, has been forgotten by the liberal dummies who need to learn it the most.

The battlefield was full of visitors, but these were almost all Normals. The same was true at Mt. Vernon and Arlington – a whole bunch of middle American folks and very few hipsters or liberals. How could I tell? You can tell. You saw families and a lot of vets, and not a lot of people who don’t look like they can do push-ups wearing t-shirts for obscure bands while their gender-indeterminate partner wears a kitty hat…”

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What Will California Ban Next?

Democrats must act to protect us from…

STEPHEN KRUISER:

“…After weeks of barking “RACIST!” like trained seals, the media shifted to another “r” word over the weekend: recession.

Sure, they’ve been murmuring it here and there for a while now, but they really upped their narrative-pimping game with it over the weekend and it’s only going to get worse going forward, I promise.

Perhaps someone at Democrat Central finally figured out that their “all racism, all the time” platform might not be winning the hearts and minds of the people they lost in 2016 and need next year.

Few things can turn the tide in an election like a tanking economy, so the Democrats are now praying to whatever passes for a god over there and hoping that, absent a real recession, they might be able to scare voters into thinking one is on the way.

On Twitter, it looked as if social media managers of various media outlets were being paid by the number of times that they could use the word “recession.”

Credit to the Washington Post, which really shook things up by running a headlineover a picture of President Trump with the word “Depression” in it.

The juiceboxers at Vox admitted halfway through their perfunctory recession postthat they didn’t know if one was coming.

That’s just it, no one does. If, however, the MSM can raise the noise level and use the power of repetition to create the sense that one is imminent, they might be able to create panic, even if a real recession doesn’t materialize.

I won’t link to them, but CNN’s site and social media feeds had enough recession talk that I checked my wallet a couple of times just to make sure things were all right.

The New York Times was shockingly honest as it opened its recession article:

These three things are all true: The United States almost certainly isn’t in a recession right now. It may well avoid one for the foreseeable future. But the chances that the nation will fall into recession have increased sharply in the last two weeks.

So, it’s not happening but it might and that’s reason enough sound the alarm.

One can almost feel the glee oozing out of the pores of the members of the media at the prospect of so many suffering. As long as they can get rid of President Trump, they care not if average Americans suffer. They are actually hoping for this misery to fall upon us…”

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SCOTT MCKAY:

“…“We built our newsroom to cover one story, and we did it truly well,” Baquet told the assemblage. “Now we have to regroup, and shift resources and emphasis to take on a different story.”

Think about that statement for a minute. Baquet says he “built our newsroom” to cover a story which turns out to have been based on a hoax spread by Democrat Party operatives and used by a corrupt Obama administration to spy on innocent American citizens while attempting to prejudice a presidential election.

Had the Times actually covered the back half of the Trump-Russia story, in which the abuses by the Obama and Clinton camps turn out to have been the meat of the thing, it might have been justified to “build our newsroom” around it. But of course that’s not what Baquet did.

Not shockingly, as Baquet admitted, things went badly.

“Chapter 1 of the story of Donald Trump,” he said, “not only for our newsroom but, frankly, for our readers, was: Did Donald Trump have untoward relationships with the Russians, and was there obstruction of justice? That was a really hard story, by the way, let’s not forget that. We set ourselves up to cover that story. I’m going to say it. We won two Pulitzer Prizes covering that story. And I think we covered that story better than anybody else.”

Then came Honest Bob Mueller, who it turns out was a big disappointment to Baquet and his gang.

“The day Bob Mueller walked off that witness stand, two things happened,” Baquet continued. “Our readers who want Donald Trump to go away suddenly thought, ‘Holy s–t, Bob Mueller is not going to do it.’ And Donald Trump got a little emboldened politically, I think. Because, you know, for obvious reasons. And I think that the story changed. A lot of the stuff we’re talking about started to emerge like six or seven weeks ago. We’re a little tiny bit flat-footed. I mean, that’s what happens when a story looks a certain way for two years. Right?”…”

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ZIVA DAHL:

“…After fourteen years of being lulled by propagandists into believing that their boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign (BDS) is a human rights movement, we’re finally waking up to the deception.

The U.S. House last month overwhelmingly passed a bill opposing BDS efforts to target and delegitimize the State of Israel. Last February, the Senate passed a bill, never taken up by the House, legalizing the right of state governments and employee benefit plans to refuse to do business with companies boycotting Israel, thereby protecting the 27 states with anti-BDS legislation. Concerned about BDS similarity to Nazi boycotts and incitement of anti-Semitism becoming “the breeding ground for escalations to violence,” the German parliament recently passed a resolution declaring BDS anti-Semitic.

The Western world is acting, albeit slowly, to unmask BDS for what it is — a dangerous 21^st century iteration of the age-old scourge of Jew-hatred. Anti-Semitism is a mutating cancer, evolving and adapting, intent on destroying Jews in their host communities. Our State Department definition of modern-day anti-Semitism identifies expressions of hatred, including when disguised as Israel-bashing and anti-Zionism, the hallmarks of BDS…”

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Another homerun from Hanson. Worth clicking over.

Victor Davis Hanson:

“…One of the weirdest characteristics of our global politicians and moral censors is their preference to voice cosmic justice rather than to address less abstract sin within their own purview or authority. These progressive virtue mongers see themselves as citizens of the world rather than of the United States and thus can impotently theorize about problems elsewhere when they cannot solve those in their own midst.

Big-city mayors are especially culpable when it comes to ignoring felonies in their midst, preferring to hector the misdemeanors of the universe. Notice how New York Mayor Bill De Blasio lords over the insidious deterioration of his city while he lectures on cosmic white supremacy.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg used to sermonize to the nation about gun-control, global warming, the perils of super-sized soft drinks, smoking, and fatty-foods in his efforts to virtue signal his moral fides—even as his New York was nearly paralyzed by the 2010 blizzard that trapped millions of his city’s residents in their homes due to inept and incompetent city efforts to remove snow. Or is the “Bloomberg syndrome” worse than that—in the sense that sounding saintly in theory psychologically compensates for being powerless in fact? Or is it a fashion tic of the privileged to show abstract empathy?

In the last years of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s governorship, Arnold more or less gave up on the existential crises of illegal immigration, sanctuary cities, soaring taxes, water shortages, decrepit roads and bridges, homelessness, plummeting public school performance, and a huge exodus out of state of middle-class Californians.

Instead he began to lecture the state, the nation, and indeed the world on the need for massive wind and solar projects and assorted green fantasies. His old enemies, jubilant that they had aborted his early conservative reform agenda, began to praise him both for his green irrelevancies and for his neutered conservatism—to the delight of the outgoing Arnold who was recalibrating his return to celebrity Hollywood…”

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ILHAN OMAR WITHDRAWS SUPPORT FROM BILL TO SAVE THE EARTH AFTER LEARNING THAT’S WHERE ISRAEL IS

I missed the rush of MSM personalities questioning the “Squad” and other Democrat leaders about this issue. Maybe they missed it? Or maybe it’s not news in their judgement?

Mike Brest:

“…The Palestinian Authority is banning all LGBT members from activities in the West Bank.

The ban comes after the group Al-Qaws for Sexual & Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society, which supports Palestinians who identify as a part of the gay community, was planning to hold a gathering for its members at the end of August, but won’t be able to anymore. Their event was supposed to be held in Nablus.

Luay Zreikat, spokesperson for the PA Police, told the Jerusalem Post that activities from the organization are “harmful to the higher values and ideals of Palestinian society.”…”

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Great article. Worth clicking over.

Roger Kimball:

“…Consider this headline: ‘Anthony Scaramucci talks to Bill Kristol about trying to force Trump off the GOP ticket in 2020.’ Can you guess the source? If you said ‘The Onion,’ you would have made a perfectly rational judgment. After all, Anthony ‘The Mooch’ Scaramucci is a metrosexual clothes-horse, hedge-fund guru, communications director for President Trump for 11 minutes — I mean ‘days,’ 11 days. (Calling up a reporter for The New Yorker and treating him to an insane, profanity-laced tirade does tend to be a career-shortening gambit.) What could this character have to do with Bill Kristol, destroyer of The Weekly Standard, serial endorser of failed political candidates, real and imagined, would-be thorn in the side of Donald Trump? Surely putting those two together was a joke, an absurdity.

But no. A joke it may be — an absurdity, too — but the source of that story is not The Onion but CNBC, not exactly an unimpeachable source, I know, but at least one with some pretensions to reporting as distinct from satire.

Still, I think we have to categorize the gist of this story under two headings: 1) truth can be stranger than fiction and 2) even the simplest fact can be the occasion of humor. Consider this elaboration: ‘Asked whether he has spoken to Scaramucci about trying to find another presidential candidate to replace Trump on the top of the GOP ticket next year, Kristol said: “Yup.”’…”

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Philly protest will support suspect accused of shooting six cops: ‘I don’t understand it,’ police commissioner says

Snopes Strikes Deal With Netflix To Provide On-Screen Fact Checks Of Fictional Shows, Movies.

Worth clicking over

Roger Kimball:

“…True, the president does not speak or act like other statesmen. But whatever the man has said, he has acted with much greater forcefulness and clarity of purpose than his recent predecessors—with some commendable results…”

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