You can see the effects of the Coronavirus in the nearly empty restaurants, coffee shops, health clubs, etc…. throughout the United States. The U.S. should have gone into recession sometime in 2016 to 2018 after corporate profits peaked during the third quarter of 2014 and annually during that year. The U.S. always follows a decline in total corporate profits with a recession unless corporate earnings pick up. However, something kept this business expansion going far beyond what it historically should have since corporate earnings have been down for almost six years.
The Fed’s $26 trillion bailout of billionaires and multi-millionaires during the last economic crisis, as well as record corporate debt, helped to prolong the record economic expansion and the stock market bubble far beyond what economic fundamentals would normally have allowed. Record corporate share buybacks have helped the bubble and expansion along, although share buybacks had long been considered market manipulation.
Apple, for example, purchased $320 billion of its own shares over the last seven years pushing its stock price after a seven-way split in 2014 from $92 a share to over $320 until January 2020. The shares have lost $50 so far and are likely to lose a lot more. $320 billion are heading down the drain.
President Donald Trump’s tax cuts which largely went to the rich and their corporations should be given plenty of credit for extending this expansion and stock market bubble. Most corporations used the tax savings for share buybacks. All that did was inflate perhaps the largest US stock market bubble in history. As the number of people filing for unemployment insurance rises, the bubble will have further to fall, and it is likely the business contraction will be worse because of it, and the president should be given plenty of credit for that too.
Income and wealth inequality has continued to grow over the last forty years to historic proportions. Consumer debt is at record levels, as is corporate debt. Gross domestic product growth has been much lower over the last decade than under President’s Carter, Reagan, Bush 41, and Clinton. The same is true with job growth. Wages have been stagnant for forty years. Home prices have fallen 8 percent since and including the fourth quarter of 2017. Rich investors are pouring out of the mortgage bond markets.
All of this suggests a recession of historic magnitude, among the worst ever. I am not the only one who thinks this way. The Fed over the last ten days has lowered interest rates, and will likely lower them even further this week. Normally that does not happen until after a recession has officially begun. In addition, the president has declared a national emergency and the Democrats and Republicans have a relief package all set for the Senate to vote on this coming week.
None of the share buybacks, federal stimulus packages, and interest rate decreases will likely defeat the impact of the Coronavirus unless they come with a vaccine. Many months from now expect the folks at the National Bureau of Economic Research to get together and determine the recession began in March 2020, maybe April.
President Trump will not be at fault, though his tax cuts for the rich and their corporations will have played a negative role in the coming debacle.
There is a reason why income and wealth inequality has gotten so bad in the United States that three men own more wealth than the bottom 50 percent of the population.
You can blame the Democrats and the Republicans and the billionaires who pull their strings. For tax cuts for the rich blame Republicans; for exporting millions of jobs and redistributing trillions of dollars of income from the 99 to the 1 percent blame the Democrats, especially the Clinton’s and Joe Biden. For deregulation of Wall Street blame Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton and Joe Biden. The list goes on but the leaders of the two parties work together behind closed doors to ensure all this stuff occurs. This is precisely why the two parties have acted so quickly together to fight the Coronavirus and the ensuing economic debacle they have created.
**An hour after I wrote and posted this story the United States Federal Reserve Bank dropped interest rates a full percent down to virtually zero and announced it would purchase $700 billion of U.S. Treasury Notes and Mortgage-Backed Bonds. The recession has not even begun and everybody in power is acting as if the next Great Depression began a year ago. The folks in power know a disaster coming when they see it. Hell, they created it by redistributing trillions of dollars from the 99 to the 1 percent during the last forty+ years. Now the chickens may be coming home to roost.