Markets plunge after Joe Biden claims he 'cured' the economy; AI czar Kamala Harris nowhere to be found
Last week, Joe Biden had it all figured out: He had "cured the economy," he muttered inchoately to reporters on July 30.
According to Fox Business:
"Mr. President What do you want your legacy for Gen Z to be?" a reporter asked.
"That I cured the economy. And the environment. And a few other small things," Biden responded.
His sidekick, Vice President Kamala Harris, echoed the claim, hoping, as PBS reported, "to turn Biden's economic record into an asset for the election."
The markets barfed.
Which brings us to this miserable result, as described by Investor's Business Daily:
Losses steepened on the Dow Jones Industrial Average as the closing bell approached Monday, with blue chips falling more than 1,000 points. The Dow slipped below its 50-day moving average and further below the psychological level of 40,000, while both the Nasdaq and the S&P 500 also sustained huge losses on the stock market today.
(Full disclosure: I used to work there.)
Financial outlets cited fears of a U.S. recession as the leading cause for the meltdown, with Friday's bad jobs report touching a benchmark for recession, as described by Fox Business:
"The July jobs report is being viewed as a recession warning, and the markets are responding accordingly," said Bill Adams, chief economist at the Dallas-based Comerica Bank.
With the jobless rate unexpectedly rising, the so-called Sahm rule is now in play. Named after former Federal Reserve economist Claudia Sahm, the rule has successfully predicted every recession since 1970.
It stipulates that the economy is in the early stages of a recession when the three-month moving average of the jobless rate is at least a half-percentage point higher than the 12-month low. Over the past three months, the unemployment rate has averaged 4.13%, which is 0.63 percentage points higher than the 3.5% rate recorded in July 2023, crossing that threshold.
More fundamentally, the problem was interest rates (which also affected trading in Japan), which had been hiked too high and too hard to brake all the inflation floating around as a result of Joe Biden's and Kamala Harris's big-government spendathons. The New York Times focused on the interest rates in its coverage and while it didn't get the big picture, it wasn't wrong.
Johns Hopkins University economist and professor, Steve Hanke, showed where the problem was.
BREAKING: Markets across the globe are CRASHING.
— Steve Hanke (@steve_hanke) August 5, 2024
Long ago & using the Quantity Theory of Money, Greenwood and I predicted a 2024 US RECESSION.
The US money supply (M2) has contracted since July 2022. ALL historical contractions in the US M2 have resulted in RECESSIONS. pic.twitter.com/GgJQfthwyz
Interest rates are closely linked to the money supply, which is why many in the market say the Fed raised rates too high, contracting the money supply and triggering a recession. Those interest rates affect financing for loans, financing for housing, and credit card rates among other things.
Spend like a sailor, as Biden-Harris have done, get too much money printed, get high inflation as a result, get the Fed trying to stop high inflation, get the Fed bumbling about where the money-supply should be to ensure economic growth, which they aren't doing well because they are so focused on woke priorities, and here we are.
But here's what Kamala Harris has to say about those high interest rates, according to the Washington Free Beacon:
Vice President Kamala Harris said young people aren't buying homes because of "climate anxiety," not mentioning the sky-high interest rates under her boss, President Joe Biden.
"Young leaders" suffer from "climate anxiety," which is "their fear about ... whether they should have children, whether they should ever think about buying a home for fear that it might be wiped out because of extreme weather occurrences," Harris said in a Wednesday interview with an Allentown, Pa., news station.
Sound like the right person to lead the U.S. away from this Harris-Biden-created government-spendathon recession?
She doesn't have a clue.
Market reports also said that stocks fell because artificial intelligence has been overhyped in the markets and was not producing as promised. Maybe so.
So who's the White House's artificial intelligence point person, or czar?
That's right, Kamala Harris is the "artificial intelligence czar," in charge of proposing regulatory legislation for all that cutting edge technology.
It would seem normal that a person in that position would know a lot about artificial intelligence, right? And be able to anticipate the stock selloff, understanding where the concerns are about overvaluation, based on the technology being limited, right?
Here's what Kamala Harris knows, according to the Washington Examiner:
While discussing artificial intelligence with civil rights leaders and consumer protection experts, Vice President Kamala Harris gave a concise explanation for the technology.
“AI is kind of a fancy thing — first of all, it’s two letters — it means artificial intelligence,” Harris said Wednesday during the AI roundtable. “It’s about machine learning. And so the machine is taught.”
And here she is in London, speaking at a major conference:
She made that speech at the U.S. embassy in London last November, and the U.K. Spectator's Angus Colwell had this scathing report:
At least Kamala Harris managed to avoid the dreaded phrase that we should ‘harness AI’s ‘potential’.
But that was just about the only blessing in the Vice President’s impressively rubbish speech yesterday at the US embassy in London.
Artificial intelligence, it is generally agreed, is the most important issue facing humanity, yet all we had was 14 minutes of waffle from the Veep. Still, it was nice of her to turn up.
Joe Biden has put Harris in charge of artificial intelligence. You can read that one of two ways: either Biden thinks that Kamala Harris is perfectly suited to grappling with the gravest existential threat, or that he thinks this AI malarkey is all a bit airy, so that looks like a good one for giving Kamala something to do.
The rest is brutal. What's the artificial intelligence czar got to say about this market meltdown, starring AI stocks?
Well, nothing, not at least yet.
That's probably why Joe Biden released his top economic advisor, Gene Sperling, to shore up Kamala Harris's economic chops, so that at least she won't be saying artificial intelligence "is artificial" to the aghast voters.
According to Fox Business:
A senior economic adviser is leaving the White House to join the Harris campaign as the stock market takes a historic tumble.
White House senior adviser Gene Sperling is leaving his administration position to work with Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential election campaign, The Associated Press reported Monday.
Sperling will be a senior economic adviser to Harris’ policy team, the outlet reported.
"Under Gene’s leadership, the American Rescue Plan has delivered economic relief to cities and counties across the country, protected millions of union pensions, made the largest-ever federal investment in public safety, and kept thousands of small businesses afloat," President Biden said in a statement to The Associated Press.
Sperling's entry to the Harris camp isn't a particularly good thing, given that this guy is an old tax-and-spend liberal whose big idea is to tout the Joe Biden spendathons, such as the "American Rescue Plan," which has triggered all those disastrous interest rate moves. Kamala Harris herself has put out a wish-list of $2 trillion more for government child care (on the Marxist model) as her economic plan, which will trigger even more inflation for the Fed to deal with.
While Sperling's entry is bad, it does show that the Harris economic plan and the Biden economic mismanagement are identical, they literally have the same people making the same messes and telling us it's all hunky dory.
President Trump has begun to hammer the Harris-Biden administration on its gross economic record, but oh, he has so much to work with. It is hoped he can hammer home that endless government spending is the same as monster stock market meltdowns and the little guy isn't going to gain from this.
The market meltdown in fact is the Harris-Biden plan in action, and God forbid they get another four years in office.
Image: Screen shot from The Telegraph video, via YouTube