President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

I wasn't asking because Ford has anything to do with recession. That was the point. . ... It was a joke between him and me from yesterday.

We are not in a recession FWIW. But the only reason we haven't seen recession is that our Federal government has run up about $7 trillion in debt over the last 3.5 years with a central bank monetizing record size bond auctions every week. Absent that (and with a deflator that actually reflected prices, not underestimates to juke the numbers, but that would be an additional conversation), people wouldn't be debating how to define recession. They'd just agree that the economy that people actually live in (where they work a job, take home nominal wages and bring them to the store) has been moribund for quite a while now in real terms.

As far as the attempt at connecting Ford's revenues to "recession". ... It wasn't even a good attempt. Revenues are meaningless when your earnings are off 30 percent year over year. Let's say you were calculating GDP-like growth based on 5 shoe salesmen. And let's say they sold shoes for prices that were 5 percent higher than they were selling them last year (i.e. revenue), but the wholesale cost of the shoes and the costs of running the shoe stores went up by 35 percent, so that the owners of the shoe stores lost a boat load of money. You wouldn't point to the 5 percent revenue increase as evidence that the shoe store business is growing.

 

Nothing selling a few trillion dollars of 10-year treasury notes, monetizing it, and helicopter dropping the money can't fix. We can keep people flush in $200K pickups and then scratch our heads when half the population is saying they feel financially stressed and drowning in debt.