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Wild74

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Posts posted by Wild74

  1. Fed’s Powell Admits Bidenomics Is Not Remotely Sustainable Or Fixable! Too Much Debt And Spending, Too Little Growth (GDP Growth Higher Than Debt Growth In Only 1 Quarter Under “Brainless Joe”)
    Confounded Interest ^ | 02/11/2024 | Anthony B. Sanders

    Posted on 2/11/2024, 4:32:19 PM by Kaiser8408a

    As Commander Cody sang, “We have too much debt.”

    “The prices of some things will decline. Others will go up. But we don’t expect to see a decline in the overall price level,” said Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, Nvidia stock hitting new highs, its market cap soaring to $1.78trln.

    “That doesn’t tend to happen in economies, except in very negative circumstances. What you will see, though, is inflation coming down,” explained the Fed Chairman, the average American neither understanding nor caring about the nuance.

    “I would say this. In the long run, the US federal government is on an unsustainable fiscal path,” said Powell, pointing out one of the most important top-down investment themes of the coming decade.

    “And that just means that the debt is growing faster than the economy. So, it is unsustainable. I don’t think that’s at all controversial. And I think we know that we have to get back on a sustainable fiscal path. And I think you’re starting to hear now from people in the elected branches who can make that happen,” he added, without naming names, because there really aren’t any.

    Under Brainless Joe and Dr. Janet Yellen, the US economy has experienced real GDP growth YoY only once (Q1 2021). Otherwise, debt growth YoY has always exceeded real GDP growth under Biden.

    I admit I am rooting for the SF 49ers over the Kansas City Swifties. At least we won’t have to listen to Brainless Biden ramble on during the Super Bowl, unless they issue a pre-recorded propaganda piece for half time similar to the John Gill character from Star Trek.

    Blank stares matter should be Biden’s new campaign slogan!

    (Excerpt) Read more at confoundedinterest.net ...

  2. 4 hours ago, KirtFalcon said:

    I haven't seen our schedule yet ... I don't even know who will be our starting QB .... I think there are 3 or 4 possibilities  .... all good athletes but not a lot of experience .... our 2nd string QB from last season was also a Sr ... so whoever gets the nod will be green 💚  ..... I was told it probably won't be the JV QB from last year .... it's a mystery at this point ....

     

     

    Waskom will have to find a QB also, didn't lose many but we did lose our QB and the backup messed his knee up so I don't know who it will be but did hear we are going out of the pistol 

  3. On 2/1/2024 at 7:00 PM, KirtFalcon said:

    Garrison lost a good many seniors, including our QB, but I believe Timpson lost more than we did ... our biggest challenge will be replacing Davidson at QB, but we have a couple of good candidates ... we had a lot of young players step up and really contribute last season and we have some really good kids moving up from outstanding JV and 8th grade teams .... we have an abundance of skilled kids with speed at the RB and WR positions .... overall, we have the core returning from very competitive team from last year .... and as always, we are growing the next batch of big and strong linemen that have a couple of holes to fill on offense and defense ....

    I think Waskom and Garrison play each other first game of the season. 

  4. Waskom is returning almost their entire team from a 3-7 season, first time in a while I don't really know what to expect out of this bunch of juniors and seniors though mostly juniors. I was expecting at least a 6-4 season last year and didn't come close just didn't take into account that 10th graders are still at the JV level of playing football. With the high risk offense that we ran had both its rewards but also its high level of fumbles. Our defense was not good enough to help the offense recover so we took our lumps. I am going to miss ole #22 but he was ready to leave, but I heard a lot of good things about Wade Lawson and look forward to seeing what he has in store for a team that still needs to mature into football players. This district is a weak district compared to what we left, with Harmony and Daingerfield being the two toughest outs in the district. Lot of unknowns going into the 2024 season but I will be there. 

    • Like 4
  5. 1 minute ago, VerumDixit said:

    That’s true. 
     

    Let’s compare what people are expecting when we see who agreed to play Waskom in pre district. That usually shows what people think of you. 

    Been waiting to see who Wade lines up for the three pre district games, heard Jefferson might be one

  6. Just now, DeBerryJacket said:

    Sorry for the bad info. A person at Waskom told me that at one of Waskom’s basketball games. 

    That was during the football season doesn't mean he hasn't gone since even though I haven't heard that, to be honest it wouldn't bother me if he did go some folks you just have to cut loose...lol

    • Like 1
  7. 37 minutes ago, DeBerryJacket said:

    EF beat Waskom last year 😜. Waskom’s best player from last year transferred to Evangel in Shreveport. He may be back in Waskom, I don’t know. But I know for sure he left to go to Evangel earlier this year. 

    He went to Evangel for a visit but wasn't accepted for what ever reason, he fininished the season at Waskom. 

    • Like 1
  8. On 1/28/2024 at 10:52 AM, BarryLaverty said:

    We are in the best shape in the world, and that has happened under President Biden. Hopefully, inflation will continue to fall, then interest rates will fall, too, which could be explosive. 
     

    (Washington Post) 
     

    Falling inflation, rising growth give U.S. the world’s best recovery

    By David J. Lynch

    January 28, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EST

    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.

    “Putting money in people’s hands vs. moving around interest rates, which is monetary policy, fiscal policy is going to be stronger,” Sahm said. “We cannot go into the next crisis being, like, ‘Oh, the Fed’s got this.’”

    Consumer spending is driving the economy: Real consumption rose by 0.5 percent in December, its fastest pace since last January. Pending home sales jumped, too. Following the flurry of good news, JPMorgan Chase economists said they raised their first-quarter growth forecast.

    IBM, Visa and General Electric last week each reported earnings that topped analysts’ expectations, another sign of the economy’s continued health.

    The $28 trillion U.S. economy weathered multiple shocks over the past year and returned to the growth path it was on before the pandemic. The size of the economy, adjusted for inflation, regained its pre-pandemic peak in early 2021. Through the end of September, it was more than 7 percent larger than before the pandemic. That was more than twice Japan’s gain and far better than Germany’s anemic 0.3 percent increase, according to British Parliament data.

    For most Americans, the growth paid off in the form of higher wages. Over the four years through September, the most recent comparison available, U.S. wages — after inflation — grew 2.8 percent.

    Most other countries in the Group of Seven industrial democracies saw a decline, according to Treasury Department data. Italian wages sank by more than 9 percent over that period, while German workers earned 7.2 percent less than they had before the pandemic.

    “The U.S. has seen a particularly strong GDP recovery and inflation has cooled sooner and more quickly than in other large, advanced economies. And the increase in real wages is unique to our country’s recovery,” Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said in a Chicago speech last week.

    The origins of this doom-defying performance can be traced to lawmakers’ swift response to the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020. Before the month had ended, Congress approved more than $2 trillion in help for the economy as businesses closed and 17 million Americans lost their jobs.

    That was just the start of Washington’s spare-no-expense response to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Congress eventually approved roughly $6 trillion to save the economy from the pandemic; Presidents Donald Trump and Biden both took administrative actions, such as a pause of student loan payments, that added another $875 billion to the rescue tab, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

    The Fed helped by cutting borrowing costs for consumers and businesses and by buying trillions of dollars’ worth of government and mortgage-backed securities to goose the economy.

    But the principal force behind today’s robust economy lies in fiscal policy, the use of government spending and taxation to boost growth. Under two presidents — one Republican and one Democrat — lawmakers opted to bathe the economy in cash to ward off the coronavirus.

    All of that government spending — the stimulus checks, the loans to small businesses and the expanded unemployment benefits — added up to an astonishing 25.5 percent of gross domestic product, according to the International Monetary Fund.

    Major European and Asian nations spent significantly less. In Germany, the government devoted 15.3 percent of GDP to battling the pandemic. France spent 9.6 percent and Italy 10.9 percent. Even Britain, which comes closest to American economic views, lagged far behind the United States with 19.3 percent of GDP.

    “The scale of fiscal support for the U.S. economy was an order of magnitude greater than in Europe,” said Neil Shearing, chief economist for Capital Economics in London.

    To be sure, the American response to the crisis was not without blemishes. Determined to avoid the policy failures that led to the anemic recovery after the 2008 financial crisis, Biden may have overcompensated.

    The final burst of coronavirus relief, the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan in early 2021, while boosting growth, is widely regarded as having contributed to the surge in prices that lifted inflation to a 40-year high of 9.1 percent.

    The rescue plan included $1,400 stimulus checks for most Americans, enhanced unemployment benefits, and aid to state and local governments. Coming on top of a separate $900 billion program in December 2020, the American Rescue Plan was responsible for two to four percentage points of the inflationary surge, according to several studies by economists.

    Emergency help for the battered economy also pushed the national debt to a new high of $34 trillion, or more than 120 percent of annual economic output, aggravating a long-term threat to the nation’s prosperity, some economists say.

    As the pandemic eased, Biden secured other legislative wins on infrastructure, semiconductor industry subsidies and clean energy projects. These were not designed as stimulus programs, but by sending additional rivers of money into the economy, they had that effect, according to Dean Baker, an economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

    “These began to kick in last year as the effect of the initial stimulus was waning. I realize this was largely luck, but it was incredibly good timing,” he said.

    The United States benefited from free-spending, fast-moving policy. But Europe suffered from being closer to the front lines of Russia’s war on Ukraine. Before the conflict erupted in February 2022, countries such as Germany depended on Russia for much of their natural gas needs. The war caused a huge spike in prices for food, fuel and fertilizer, causing inflation in the euro area to rocket.

    Europe’s response to the economic crisis generally required businesses that received government help to keep their workers on the payroll. Whereas Americans were laid off, but then aided by unemployment and stimulus checks, Europeans were kept on the job.

    That spared them the uncertainty of labor market limbo but often locked them into jobs that were not needed in the post-pandemic world.

    Biden's course for U.S. on trade breaks with Clinton and Obama

    For years after the 2008 crisis, President Barack Obama — under pressure from a Republican Congress — accepted a need to reduce federal spending. That left the Fed to fight economic weakness on its own. Next time, thanks to the pandemic experience, the nation’s eyes may turn to Capitol Hill.

    One lesson from the pandemic recovery is the power of the government’s ability to tax and spend, economists said. Congressional actions can affect the economy faster than the lagged impact of a change in borrowing costs and are more certain than the results of other, less conventional Fed policies designed to spur growth.

    “Government, through fiscal policy, really can affect the speed of recovering from a downturn,” said former Fed economist Michael Strain, now with the American Enterprise Institute. “Now, there are a million caveats to that.”

    Every dip in the economy does not require massive government intervention, and whatever programs are implemented should be well-designed and carefully policed. In the rush to release covid aid, for example, the Small Business Administration disbursed more than $200 billion in potentially fraudulent business loans and related assistance, the agency’s inspector general reported last year.

    That is more than the Transportation Department’s annual budget.

    Some economists see more than government policy behind the U.S. recovery. As the pandemic made millions of Americans jobless almost overnight in the spring of 2020, many responded by launching new business ventures.

    That trend has continued for four years. In December, 457,316 applications for tax identification numbers were lodged with the Internal Revenue Service, compared with 314,337 in December 2019.

    “I think we’re seeing something about the American spirit and the kind of economic dynamism that — for whatever reason — doesn’t exist in other high-income countries to the extent that it exists here,” Strain said. “One of the most interesting things happening in the economy right now, and over the last few years, is the big boom in entrepreneurship.”

    Layoffs surged 136% in January to second-highest level on record
    Fox Business ^ | 2/01/24 | Megan Henney

    The pace of job cuts by U.S. employers accelerated at the start of 2024, a sign the labor market is starting to deteriorate in the face of ongoing inflation and high interest rates.

    That is according to a new report published by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which found that companies planned 82,307 job cuts in January, a substantial 136% increase from the previous month. However, that is down about 20% from the same time one year ago. It marked the second-highest layoff total for the month of January in data going back to 2009.

    "Waves of layoff announcements hit U.S.-based companies in January after a quiet fourth quarter," said Andy Challenger, senior vice president of Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The cuts were "driven by broader economic trends and a strategic shift towards increased automation and AI adoption in various sectors, though in most cases, companies point to cost-cutting as the main driver for layoffs."

    Financial companies bore the brunt of the job losses in January, with the industry shedding 23,238 employees. That is the highest monthly layoff total for the financial sector since September 2018, when it announced 27,343 job cuts.

    The technology sector followed with 15,806 layoffs, the most since May 2023 and a stunning 254% increase from just one month prior.

    "The impact of rapidly advancing artificial intelligence adoption is beginning to be felt from a jobs perspective, particularly in media and tech, but truly across sectors," Challenger said. "That said, companies are not outright blaming AI for many layoff decisions."

    Food production companies also accounted for a large swath of the job cuts in January, slashing 6,656 positions — the highest monthly total for the sector since November 2012. Challenger said that "high costs and advancing automation" are reshaping how the industry operates.

    (Excerpt) Read more at foxbusiness.com ...

  9. On 1/28/2024 at 10:52 AM, BarryLaverty said:

    We are in the best shape in the world, and that has happened under President Biden. Hopefully, inflation will continue to fall, then interest rates will fall, too, which could be explosive. 
     

    (Washington Post) 
     

    Falling inflation, rising growth give U.S. the world’s best recovery

    By David J. Lynch

    January 28, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EST

    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.

    “Putting money in people’s hands vs. moving around interest rates, which is monetary policy, fiscal policy is going to be stronger,” Sahm said. “We cannot go into the next crisis being, like, ‘Oh, the Fed’s got this.’”

    Consumer spending is driving the economy: Real consumption rose by 0.5 percent in December, its fastest pace since last January. Pending home sales jumped, too. Following the flurry of good news, JPMorgan Chase economists said they raised their first-quarter growth forecast.

    IBM, Visa and General Electric last week each reported earnings that topped analysts’ expectations, another sign of the economy’s continued health.

    The $28 trillion U.S. economy weathered multiple shocks over the past year and returned to the growth path it was on before the pandemic. The size of the economy, adjusted for inflation, regained its pre-pandemic peak in early 2021. Through the end of September, it was more than 7 percent larger than before the pandemic. That was more than twice Japan’s gain and far better than Germany’s anemic 0.3 percent increase, according to British Parliament data.

    For most Americans, the growth paid off in the form of higher wages. Over the four years through September, the most recent comparison available, U.S. wages — after inflation — grew 2.8 percent.

    Most other countries in the Group of Seven industrial democracies saw a decline, according to Treasury Department data. Italian wages sank by more than 9 percent over that period, while German workers earned 7.2 percent less than they had before the pandemic.

    “The U.S. has seen a particularly strong GDP recovery and inflation has cooled sooner and more quickly than in other large, advanced economies. And the increase in real wages is unique to our country’s recovery,” Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said in a Chicago speech last week.

    The origins of this doom-defying performance can be traced to lawmakers’ swift response to the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020. Before the month had ended, Congress approved more than $2 trillion in help for the economy as businesses closed and 17 million Americans lost their jobs.

    That was just the start of Washington’s spare-no-expense response to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Congress eventually approved roughly $6 trillion to save the economy from the pandemic; Presidents Donald Trump and Biden both took administrative actions, such as a pause of student loan payments, that added another $875 billion to the rescue tab, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

    The Fed helped by cutting borrowing costs for consumers and businesses and by buying trillions of dollars’ worth of government and mortgage-backed securities to goose the economy.

    But the principal force behind today’s robust economy lies in fiscal policy, the use of government spending and taxation to boost growth. Under two presidents — one Republican and one Democrat — lawmakers opted to bathe the economy in cash to ward off the coronavirus.

    All of that government spending — the stimulus checks, the loans to small businesses and the expanded unemployment benefits — added up to an astonishing 25.5 percent of gross domestic product, according to the International Monetary Fund.

    Major European and Asian nations spent significantly less. In Germany, the government devoted 15.3 percent of GDP to battling the pandemic. France spent 9.6 percent and Italy 10.9 percent. Even Britain, which comes closest to American economic views, lagged far behind the United States with 19.3 percent of GDP.

    “The scale of fiscal support for the U.S. economy was an order of magnitude greater than in Europe,” said Neil Shearing, chief economist for Capital Economics in London.

    To be sure, the American response to the crisis was not without blemishes. Determined to avoid the policy failures that led to the anemic recovery after the 2008 financial crisis, Biden may have overcompensated.

    The final burst of coronavirus relief, the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan in early 2021, while boosting growth, is widely regarded as having contributed to the surge in prices that lifted inflation to a 40-year high of 9.1 percent.

    The rescue plan included $1,400 stimulus checks for most Americans, enhanced unemployment benefits, and aid to state and local governments. Coming on top of a separate $900 billion program in December 2020, the American Rescue Plan was responsible for two to four percentage points of the inflationary surge, according to several studies by economists.

    Emergency help for the battered economy also pushed the national debt to a new high of $34 trillion, or more than 120 percent of annual economic output, aggravating a long-term threat to the nation’s prosperity, some economists say.

    As the pandemic eased, Biden secured other legislative wins on infrastructure, semiconductor industry subsidies and clean energy projects. These were not designed as stimulus programs, but by sending additional rivers of money into the economy, they had that effect, according to Dean Baker, an economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

    “These began to kick in last year as the effect of the initial stimulus was waning. I realize this was largely luck, but it was incredibly good timing,” he said.

    The United States benefited from free-spending, fast-moving policy. But Europe suffered from being closer to the front lines of Russia’s war on Ukraine. Before the conflict erupted in February 2022, countries such as Germany depended on Russia for much of their natural gas needs. The war caused a huge spike in prices for food, fuel and fertilizer, causing inflation in the euro area to rocket.

    Europe’s response to the economic crisis generally required businesses that received government help to keep their workers on the payroll. Whereas Americans were laid off, but then aided by unemployment and stimulus checks, Europeans were kept on the job.

    That spared them the uncertainty of labor market limbo but often locked them into jobs that were not needed in the post-pandemic world.

    Biden's course for U.S. on trade breaks with Clinton and Obama

    For years after the 2008 crisis, President Barack Obama — under pressure from a Republican Congress — accepted a need to reduce federal spending. That left the Fed to fight economic weakness on its own. Next time, thanks to the pandemic experience, the nation’s eyes may turn to Capitol Hill.

    One lesson from the pandemic recovery is the power of the government’s ability to tax and spend, economists said. Congressional actions can affect the economy faster than the lagged impact of a change in borrowing costs and are more certain than the results of other, less conventional Fed policies designed to spur growth.

    “Government, through fiscal policy, really can affect the speed of recovering from a downturn,” said former Fed economist Michael Strain, now with the American Enterprise Institute. “Now, there are a million caveats to that.”

    Every dip in the economy does not require massive government intervention, and whatever programs are implemented should be well-designed and carefully policed. In the rush to release covid aid, for example, the Small Business Administration disbursed more than $200 billion in potentially fraudulent business loans and related assistance, the agency’s inspector general reported last year.

    That is more than the Transportation Department’s annual budget.

    Some economists see more than government policy behind the U.S. recovery. As the pandemic made millions of Americans jobless almost overnight in the spring of 2020, many responded by launching new business ventures.

    That trend has continued for four years. In December, 457,316 applications for tax identification numbers were lodged with the Internal Revenue Service, compared with 314,337 in December 2019.

    “I think we’re seeing something about the American spirit and the kind of economic dynamism that — for whatever reason — doesn’t exist in other high-income countries to the extent that it exists here,” Strain said. “One of the most interesting things happening in the economy right now, and over the last few years, is the big boom in entrepreneurship.”

    Heard the reason things are increasing at this time and not over the last three years is the market is anticipating Trump being President the next four years. 

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