Excerpts from article here, bold added:
Yesterday morning, it was the same. The GDP numbers reported a first-quarter shrinkage of 1.4% annualized and what do they tell us? This is just noise, not a signal. That was the main message from all media outlets.
It’s only a flesh wound, one might say obligatory Monty Python. The economy will soon bounce back. Just give it time! Sure, but how much time? How deep can the recession/depression get? No one knows for sure. We know by now that the experts are happy to lie about their intuitions, if only to keep the public calm.
.
Truth is that based on the existing data, we are very deep into the formation of the real thing: an inflationary recession. It’s also called stagflation. Yes, that very thing that decades ago economists said would be impossible. It happened anyway in the 1970s. And it’s happening now. The only question that remains is just how bad this can get before it gets better.
.
A Gallup poll shows only 2 percent of the public (meaning practically no one) says that economic conditions are excellent. That, by itself, is amazing given that one third of the whole of the existing money supply (as measured by M2) has been manufactured in the last two years. People have had money raining down on their heads. Where’s the appreciation?
.
One major factor that makes this inflationary recession different from any we’ve seen before is the weird labor shortage. Ask anyone why it is happening. No regular person seems to have an answer. Where are the workers? Some three million are just missing. Businesses don’t understand it and the media isn’t even curious.
Here’s a reason we are not hearing about this: the explanation falls along gendered lines.
One third of non-employed women surveyed said that during the pandemic lockdowns, they had to leave the workforce to care for children or other family members. They left and did not come back.
As for men, a quarter said that their industry was suffering and good jobs just didn’t make coming back worth it.
.
What about the future? Most men will eventually come back to work. Not so for women: one third have said they are better off tending to home matters, rather than fighting in the rat race of modern employment, especially with school and childcare so sketchy and aging parents who need care.
Finally, we have early retirement. Many people in their late 50s just decided to take their pension and go.
.
Now, do you see why we haven’t heard about this? Incredibly, the pandemic response wiped out 50 years of what “feminists” used to call “gains for women.” Child care closed, workers were sent home, and schools closed. As a result, we are back to the point that fewer than half of married women with children are in the workforce. That there is zero mention of this astonishing fact in the public press is absolutely remarkable.
.
The real concern: is the cause and effect obvious? Governments in the US crushed market functioning in the name of virus control, and all the rest fell into place after: the spending, the debt, the monetary floods, the panicked purging of the labor force of the noncompliant, the wrecking of trade networks, driving people out of work, ruining businesses, low growth, and all the rest.
You can even say that this impending recession is lab created, hatched in the formerly hallowed halls of government under the wild idea that a virus could be intimidated to go away by titles, badges, and force.
Consider too that this is only the damage we see. As Frederic Bastiat demonstrated, the real cost is that which we cannot see: the employments, investments, technologies, and improved lives that did not take place because the pandemic response made it impossible. The fullness of that we will never know.
there doesn't seem to be anything here