by Larry Kudlow at Fox Business
Recession risk grows larger and stocks are getting clobbered. Investors who were irrationally exuberant only a few weeks ago, are now running for the hills. Stocks are getting clobbered with the Dow down 2,000 points the last three trading days. There may also be some politics to this story, as chameleon Kamala Harris is polling better than Joe Biden was, as low a bar as that may be, but no matter what she says, we know she hates business.
The real meat and potatoes of the stock slamdown is rising unemployment, coupled with falling consumer sentiment, and an overall recession-like weakening of the economy. The data are incomplete, but without question, a nearly 1% point rise in the unemployment rate this year strongly suggests the economy is on the front-end of a recession.
Just last month, 352,000 people joined the unemployment lines. Actually, over the past year, the number of unemployed has risen 1.3 million.
THE JULY JOBS REPORT JUST TRIGGERED A RELIABLE RECESSION INDICATOR
While the jump to 4.3% in the last four months is worrisome, an even broader measure of labor market weakness is the so-called labor impairment rate, or the underemployment rate, which has leapfrogged to 7.8%. That includes part-timers who want full-time work, plus discouraged workers, and that’s the soft underbelly of the Biden-Harris labor market.
Meanwhile, over the last year, Biden-Harris policies have led to half a million more part-time workers, and an actual negative half million fall in full-time.
Plus, their catastrophic open border policies have led to an increase in 1.3 million foreign-born workers and a 1.2 million decline in native-born American workers. In other words, it’s been a far shakier economy than most of the media has ever been willing to admit.
Let’s not forget a recessionary first half of 2022,…
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