The markets are crashing, and any unbiased analysis of economic data shows the economy is on the brink of recession.
Years of Biden economics — high taxes, huge spending, and a ton of unnecessary, excessive regulation that assumes expensive electric cars will be in every garage, leaving no room for chicken in any pot — are finally being exposed, like Sleepy Joe’s declining mind and Kamala Harris’ inability to put together coherent thoughts.
On top of that, a Kamala crash is happening, with stocks plummeting as the mainstream media sweeps Biden-Harris’ terrible record on the economy under the rug and traders digest the very real possibility that the top economic idiot on the Democratic ticket will be elected president — a scenario I foretell in my book, out tomorrow. If you wake up, you’ll be bankrupt. The radicalization of American corporations.
The Biden administration, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, with the huge support of American business, has attempted the biggest economic rebuild since President Franklin Roosevelt. At least Roosevelt had an excuse: the Great Depression. Biden and Harris inherited from Donald Trump economic growth and recovery from a deadly pandemic. They have used the post-COVID economic improvement and the Democratic majority in Congress to impose left-wing policies on an American people who just wanted normalcy after a tumultuous few years.
This is Biden-Harris normalcy. With the help of asset managers pushing companies to make ESG investments that prevent oil companies from doing what they should do and drilling for oil, the Biden administration has taken spending to new absurd levels, funded by a ploy of short-term debt refinancing to hide the direct impact on interest rates, subsidized loss-making industries, given away free stuff, and forgiven student loans.
It worked for a while, but all the free spending (and easy money from the Fed) started to crash the economy first by imposing harmful taxes on the working class called inflation. Since Biden and Harris refused to support the supply side of the economy (i.e. cut taxes and regulations) to bring inflation down, the Fed was the only option. The Fed raised interest rates so much that the inevitable is happening as I write this: the economy is slowing while the prices of basic necessities remain too high for the working class to afford.
Biden and Harris did nothing while the economy burned, but some smart investors saw it coming. Wake up and you’ll be bankruptSeveral of my sources saw the quagmire as the Biden-Harris Administration’s trillion-dollar spending plans began to take shape and their odd support for environmental orders that would curb oil drilling and encourage car companies to make EVs that no one will buy began to fuel what the White House called “temporary inflation.”
One is James Gorman, the now-retired CEO of Morgan Stanley. In my book, I call him “arguably one of Wall Street’s smartest CEOs.” I also write, “Morgan Stanley was one of the firms that brought Wall Street to Main Street. As CEO, he served millions of retail investors through Morgan’s securities division. That meant he and his team had to see through the government’s manipulation of economic data. Gorman saw the spending orgy for what it was: a foolish cure in search of an economic problem that didn’t exist. A convenient excuse to satisfy the left’s political agenda of more government expansion, endless transfer payments, electric cars in every garage, cuts in oil exploration, massive increases in government spending, and of course, too much money chasing far fewer goods.”
Gorman had been listening to the propaganda coming from the White House, with Biden’s inept appointee, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, describing inflation as old news, and equally inept bully Kamala Harris describing it as a disease of “rising prices… meaning the cost of living is rising… this is an issue that we’re taking seriously.”
Let’s just say Gorman was not impressed. Or, as he told me over dinner in the summer of 2021, “I don’t believe in any of that fugitive inflation bullshit… I can guarantee you that inflation is real and it’s going to be a problem.”
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks ahead of the one-year anniversary of the Biden administration’s Controlling Inflation Act, in Seattle, Aug. 15, 2023. (AP Photo/Lindsay Wasson)
And the change in corporate mindset encouraged by the Biden administration has made the situation worse. The inflation we are experiencing is going down, but only in terms of rates. Prices are still higher than they were four years ago, and one of the reasons I pointed out is that Wake up and you’ll be bankrupt That’s the burden of ESG. Asset managers have encouraged companies to go green, cut oil production, and produce goods through inefficient means, making the world a much more expensive place for the working class today. “ESG was not the only cause of inflation during the Biden era,” I wrote. “But ESG has made it increasingly difficult to eradicate inflation using the usual policy tools.”
To be sure, a woke government and woke corporations are destabilizing the U.S. economy. As markets sway and the economy slows, Sleepy Joe and Chatty Kamala talk about Supreme Court reform. And the media-industrial complex tolerates the president-elect not answering a single serious policy question in the weeks since she made her predecessor the top choice, because doing so might get Donald Trump elected.
Corporate America is now finally backing away from wokeness because consumers hate being forced into progressive cultural change like seeing a transgender woman sipping her favorite beer in a bubble bath. Otherwise, Bud Light would still be the best-selling beer in the country. If people liked woke capitalism, BlackRock CEO and former ESG kingmaker Larry Fink would still be singing its praises, instead of vowing to never use the acronym again.
If wokeness sells, Jamie Dimon won’t back down from fighting wokeness. The CEO of JP Morgan has gone full woke after the tragic death of George Floyd. In public statements, he has denounced systemic racism and spoken out about new lending programs as if cheap mortgages would have stopped George Floyd from trying to buy cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill and resisting arrest that afternoon in Minneapolis. Dimon even visited a bank branch during the 2020 Summer of Love and was photographed kneeling, in apparent solidarity with the social justice and Black Lives Matter protests following Floyd’s murder.
I asked about Dimon’s stance. Was he invoking his inner BLM? At the time, his publicists had no problem tacitly acknowledging Dimon’s virtues. That suddenly changed, as I report in my book. Now that BLM’s shaky finances, twisted left-wing, and sometimes violent ideology have been thoroughly exposed, Dimon’s reps assure me he was kneeling — but only to be photographed. It took four years, and possibly some nasty behavior from BLM’s Chicago chapter (including posting a photo on social media of a paraglider flying a Palestinian flag, honoring the monsters who committed the October 7 massacre near Gaza), for them to come up with it.
Kamala Harris has promised more of the same, which is one of the big reasons the market is crashing.
Charles Gasparino is a senior correspondent for FOX Business and a columnist for the New York Post. Follow: Gasparino.
