Larry Kudlow Insists an Economic Downturn Is Impossible Under Trump – By Bess Levin (vanityfair.com) / Nov 20 2018
Trump’s non-economist economic adviser, who flubbed the last recession, says there’s no cause for alarm.
In December 2007, the month the Great Recession started, then CNBC talking head Larry Kudlow boldly told viewers, “There’s no recession coming. The pessimists were wrong. It‘s not going to happen. At a bare minimum, we’re looking at Goldilocks 2.0.” In February 2008, one month before his former employer Bear Stearns went down for the dirt nap, he claimed the economy was going to rebound that summer, “if not sooner.” In July 2008—yes, July 2008!—he declared that the housing market was as healthy as it had ever been, and that it was “a pity [that] the mainstream media” was just “searching for more and more pessimism” to sell newspapers. Strangely, in the 10 years since, Kudlow has not gotten any better at predicting things that are not only staring him in the face, but practically biting him on the ass. What he has gotten, however, is a job at the White House. There, as National Economic Council director, he’s busted out such gems as “The deficit . . . is coming down, and it’s coming down rapidly,“ several weeks after the Treasury Department reported the budget deficit had increased 66 percent year over year, and right around the time the Congressional Budget Office said the deficit is likely to hit $804 billion in 2018 and $981 billion in 2019, after coming in at $666 billion in 2017. And on Tuesday, he treated the nation to another one of his deeply prescient calls.
Speaking to reporters outside the White House, the former Reagan associate budget director told reporters, “I’m reading some of the weirdest stuff [about] how a recession is right around the corner—NONSENSE. My personal view? Our administration’s view? Recession is so far in the distance I can’t see it.” Unfortunately, that’s not the view of people who don’t have a long, mortifying history of almost never being right. Rather, economists polled by The Wall Street Journal agree that a downturn is coming, likely in 2020, with economist Peter Schiff warning it’ll be “worse than the Great Depression.” In addition to dismissing such forecasts as total poppycock, Kudlow—who is not a trained economist—essentially said that Goldman Sachs’s recent conclusion that economic growth will “slow significantly” in 2019 was the work of a bunch of socialist hacks. “My colleague, Kevin Hassett, had some choice words for Goldman Sachs and their partisan forecast,” Kudlow told Fox News’s Stuart Varney. “But I’m such a nice guy I’m not even going to go there, Stu.” (Last month, Hassett claimed that the bank was working for the “Democratic opposition” because it estimated that a 25 percent tariff on Chinese imports could wipe out earnings growth for S&P 500 companies next year.)
But don’t worry! In the highly unlikely event Kudlow turns out to be wrong about something, and a recession experts say we’re not at all prepared to handle does strike in the near future, it’ll actually be a good thing, according to 2008 Larry. Because months after the recession had officially started—at which point, he would only offer that the “recessionary handwriting looks to be on the wall”—he had this to say: “recessions are therapeutic.”
Recession, no recession, little recession, big recession: whatever happens, we’ll be safe in big Lar’s steady and all-knowing hands.
Over the weekend, the Central Intelligence Agency concluded that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had ordered the assassination of journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi. While compelling evidence had piled up for more than a month that this was the case, the assessment from the spy agency was the most definitive to date, and would seemingly have made it difficult for Donald Trump to continue to go to bat for his buddy M.B.S. But: surprise!
President Trump issued an exclamation-mark packed statement Tuesday defending Saudi Arabia, undermining the CIA’s conclusion that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was responsible for the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and effectively declaring closed the debate over whether to stand by the kingdom.
In reaching its conclusions, the CIA examined multiple sources of intelligence, including a phone call that the prince’s brother Khalid bin Salman, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, had with Khashoggi, according to the people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the intelligence. Khalid told Khashoggi, a contributing columnist to The Washington Post, that he should go to the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul to retrieve the documents and gave him assurances that it would be safe to do so. . . . [Khalid] made the call at his brother’s direction, according to the people familiar with the call, which was intercepted by U.S. intelligence.
The CIA’s conclusion about Mohammed’s role was also based on the agency’s assessment of the prince as the country’s de facto ruler who oversees even minor affairs in the kingdom. “The accepted position is that there is no way this happened without him being aware or involved,” said a U.S. official familiar with the CIA’s conclusions.
Still, according to Trump, the jury is out on whether or not bin Salman ordered the hit; “maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!” the president of the United States actually wrote on official letterhead. Elsewhere, he made the case that “the world is a very dangerous place!” and things like this happen all the time. For example, did you know that Iran is pretty evil? Well it is! (As New York’s Jonathan Chait points out, “nobody is proposing a geopolitical alliance with that country.”) Anyway, here’s the thing: Saudi Arabia is paying us for weapons. And it’s selling us oil at a pretty decent price. How rude would it be to adequately condemn the murder of a U.S. resident in return? Very rude indeed. Plus, y’know, they (meaning the prince and his henchmen, i.e. the people trying to get away with murder) say this Khashoggi guy was a pretty bad dude. Nobody else says it, but they do, so here’s some propaganda on that front:
Representatives of Saudi Arabia say that Jamal Khashoggi was an “enemy of the state” and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, but my decision is in no way based on that—this is an unacceptable and horrible crime.
In sum, Trump’s statement essentially said, it‘s sad someone had to be murdered and dismembered, but not sad enough for the leader of the free world to actually do anything about it, or to send a message that things like this—or, say, the torture by electric shock and lashings of the prince’s critics—are unacceptable. After all, who else is going to keep the president’s hotels afloat?
The stock market has had better days
The Dow Jones plunged more than 551 points on Tuesday, dragged down by disappointing Target news and concerns about the retail sector in general ahead of the pivotal holiday season. https://t.co/pscQMUQo6z pic.twitter.com/1exQaxGiNk
— ABC News (@ABC) November 20, 2018
In addition to falling more than 551 points, the Dow Jones wiped out its gains for 2018, as did the S&P 500, which fell almost 2 percent. “I think there’s very clear signs that investors are beginning to worry about weaker growth in the coming year or so, and how that’s going to feed through to corporate earnings,” Michael Pearce, senior United States economist with Capital Economics, told The New York Times. (Apparently investors didn’t get Kudlow’s message that the economy is as healthy as a goddamn horse.)
The Trump administration‘s regulatory rollbacks will make more people poor, sick, dead, says Trump administration
Don’t take our word for it! Per the L.A. Times:
These human costs—which include more deaths from air pollution, higher medical bills, and increased student debt—rarely get mentioned by the president, who often touts the economic benefits of his deregulatory campaign. But a review of thousands of pages of federal regulatory and legal filings shows that multiple agencies predict in their own analyses that the changes will cause an extensive list of harmful, even deadly, effects.
The Environmental Protection Agency, for example, calculated as many as 1,400 more premature deaths a year as a result of its proposed rule providing incentives to electric utilities to keep coal-fired power plants operating longer. . . . The Department of Education, which has taken several steps to scale back rules on for-profit colleges and universities, conceded that one of its rollbacks had left students with more than $50 million in additional debt. . . . And the Department of Health and Human Services predicted that a regulation lifting restrictions on health plans with skimpier benefits would reduce sicker patients’ access to medical care and expose them higher costs.
“I have never seen an administration take such a callous view of the health impacts of their policy proposals,” Lyndsay Moseley Alexander, who directs the American Lung Association’s Healthy Air Campaign, told the Times, which we assume the administration takes as a badge of honor.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/11/larry-kudlow-insists-recession-is-impossible-under-trump
