The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

 

The good:

The European economy, hobbled by unfamiliar weakness in Germany, is barely growing. China is struggling to recapture its sizzle. And Japan continues to disappoint.

But in the United States, it’s a different story. Here, despite lingering consumer angst over inflation, the surprisingly strong economy is outperforming all of its major trading partners.

Since 2020, the United States has powered through a once-in-a-century pandemic, the highest inflation in 40 years and fallout from two foreign wars. Now, after posting faster annual growth last year than in 2022, the U.S. economy is quashing fears of a new recession while offering lessons for future crisis-fighting.

“The U.S. has really come out of this into a place of strength and is moving forward like covid never happened,” said Claudia Sahm, a former Federal Reserve economist who now runs an eponymous consulting firm. “We earned this; it wasn’t just a fluke.”

On Friday, President Biden hailed fresh government data showing that annual inflation over the second half of 2023 fell back to the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target. Coupled with Thursday’s news that the economy grew by 3.1 percent over the past 12 months, the Commerce Department report showed that the United States appears to have achieved an economic soft landing.

The post-pandemic recovery challenged long-standing economic beliefs, such as the idea of an inverse relationship between unemployment and inflation. (As one rose, the other was expected to fall.) Expressed in what economists call the Phillips curve, this nostrum proved nearly useless in explaining the economy’s recent behavior.

Washington’s success in reviving the economy also suggests a new approach to future downturns, one that relies more on the government’s power of the purse and less on the Federal Reserve’s control of the cost of credit... (our emphasis)

The "feels" vs. "real" dynamic is beginning to change, with fears of a recession subsiding and consumer confidence rebounding sharply.  We've had the best recovery from the Covid pandemic downturn of any other nation in the world.  It's not a story the Christofascist Republicans want you to hear, but it's going to be heard, and more importantly felt in yet another existential election year.

The bad:

Russia is increasingly confident that deepening economic and diplomatic ties with China and the Global South will allow it to challenge the international financial system dominated by the United States and undermine the West, according to Kremlin documents and interviews with Russian officials and business executives.

Russia has been buoyed by its success in holding off a Western-backed Ukrainian counteroffensive followed by political stalemates in Washington and Brussels over continued funding for Kyiv. In Moscow’s view, the U.S. backing of Israel’s invasion of Gaza has damaged Washington’s standing in many parts of the world. The confluence of events has led to a surge of optimism about Russia’s global position.

Officials in Moscow point to growing trade with China, military cooperation with Iran, diplomatic outreach in the Arab world and the expansion of the BRICS grouping of major emerging economies — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — to include Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Ethiopia.

The BRICS expansion demonstrated the group’s “growing authority and role in world affairs,” and its work will focus on “sovereign equality,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a Jan. 1 statement as Russia assumed the chairmanship of the group. The Kremlin has begun to refer to itself as part of the “Global Majority.”

Internal Russian Security Council documents obtained by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post, show that the Kremlin convened meetings in 2022 and 2023 on ways to undermine the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency. The ultimate goal, one of the documents stated, was to dismantle the post-World War II global financial system and the power it gives Washington. [snip]

European security officials said that Moscow is very much Beijing’s junior partner and that it is unclear China has any real interest in aligning with the Kremlin’s grandiose visions. But Russia’s focus on using its global position to disrupt the West is intensifying, the officials said, including in the Middle East.

Russia is “not omnipotent, but they try to use all possibilities. They are very consistent and systematic,” said one senior European official who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters...

Putin's "grandiose visions" are of the same cloth as his imperialistic designs on Ukraine and other parts of the former Soviet Union and beyond.  Just as his "3-day war" on Ukraine was foiled, so will his other "grandiose visions" as long as the West stays united.  The smaller the man, the bigger the ambitions.

The ugly: 

One of the fondest bits of resistance fantasy has been the notion that the nation’s economic elites — the titans of Wall Street, the beautiful people of Davos, the economic masters of the universe— would, in our moment of peril, mount the barricades to defend democracy.

To which a reasonable person might have responded: Have you met these guys?

For about five minutes after January 6, it seemed that the business community had, in fact, found or fabricated a moral compass. “There are some members who, by their actions, will have forfeited the support of the US Chamber of Commerce. Period. Full stop,” the chamber’s vice-president, Neil Bradley, declared when the group announced a ban on contributions to representatives who had voted against certifying Joe Biden’s win.

There were full-page ads and ringing declarations. “This is not who we are as a people or a country,” insisted Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan.

Ah, but.

The chamber quietly dropped its ban on election deniers. The cash still flows. And last week in Davos, we found out how far Dimon had evolved on extraneous details like the peaceful transfer of power and attempted insurrections. Dimon now says that Donald Trump was right about lots of things and, like other moguls, is now okay with either Biden or Trump.

“My company,” he said, “will survive and thrive in both.” ...

There needs to be a reckoning some day for these amoral leeches.  A second Biden term might be the only opportunity for that to occur.  And, no, we don't mean "revenge;" we mean strengthening regulations on the banking, private fund and securities world (if the Republican Supreme Court doesn't overturn or weaken Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council this term).  Allowing these amoral anti-democracy "titans" so much power is a recipe for more disasters.