While Larry Kudlow (Treasury Secretary and Chief Economic Cheerleader) assures us that Trump is NOT interfering with the Fed, our dear president has proclaimed that our Central Bank is “crazy” for raising rates.
From his, ahem, unique worldview, he believes they’re trying to wreck his new gravy train economy… the one he created with major tax cuts ($1.5 trillion), major repatriations from overseas ($2 trillion), deregulation, and a lot of positive talk about 4% to 5% growth again…
But, with no fear of sounding like a broken record: sustaining growth rates at that level are demographically IMPOSSIBLE!
With nine years of stimulus and accelerated fiscal BS, we’re running out of eligible workers to hire. That means wage inflation.
But the bigger problem is that natural workforce growth – people ages 20 to 64 becoming contributing members of the economy – is flat to slightly down for the next several years, and even for decades to come.
And productivity is declining from the aging of our workforce and the Baby Boom. It was 3%-plus in the 1980s and 1990s. Now it’s 0.5% and falling towards ZERO!
Once we run out of workers, after hiring back people who dropped out (something I see happening within the next year), there is NO growth in the workforce and no way productivity magically moves back to 3%-plus.
We’re also running out of affordable homes for sale.
Donald’s massive tax cuts have fueled growth and inflation, even if temporarily.
His stimulus plans and the Fed’s steady rate hikes to “normalize” are causing the dollar to rise and global borrowing rates to rise for emerging countries (and they’re the ones who borrowed most of the money, mostly in U.S. dollars after developed countries maxed out in 2008).
Now currencies are collapsing in countries like Turkey, Venezuela, Argentina, and Iran… and even China a bit.
Emerging stock markets are down 20% to 40%, with China’s down 29% recently.
