A wave of business bankruptcies is slamming the U.S. economy, Business Insider reports. “From billion-dollar giants to mom-and-pop shops to everyday individuals, bankruptcies are piling up across the US this year, with large corporate bankruptcies already hitting their highest level in 15 years.” Do tell.
Paul Krugman writes that small businesses are getting the worst of it. Although the tariffs are hurting everybody, big companies are better able to absorb sudden extra cost. Big companies can also game the system to their advantage; small businesses cannot. Finally, the end of the Obamacare tax credits means small business employees, and many employers, are losing their health insurance.
Meanwhile, manufacturing jobs are evaporating. Trump really didn’t do much for manufacturing jobs in his first term. For a couple of years he coasted on the momentum of President Obama’s economy, but by 2019 the U.S. was in a manufacturing recession. (See U.S. manufacturing dives to 10-year low as trade tensions weigh by Reuters, October 2019.) And then came Covid.
But that was then. A month ago Fortune reported that Despite Trump’s best efforts to reshore manufacturing, blue-collar employment is plunging for the first time since the pandemic with 59,000 lost jobs. Sorry I can’t report past the headline; there’s a paywall. For how many manufacturing jobs Trump has actually lost, see the Center for Economic and Policy Research. The numbers are preliminary, but could be as many as 208,000. And that’s just manufacturing. See also ‘An Abject Failure’: Economists Trash Trump’s Disastrous Job Creation Record in Year-End Reviews at Common Dreams.
Whether the U.S. economy is in danger or is showing resilience and should do fine depends on whom you ask. But from what I’m reading all the juice is going into tech, especially AI and related industries, while everything else is struggling. And of course Trump and the clowns he’s chosen for his cabinet are not capable of making any of this any better.
But I’m not sure the state of the economy is getting as much attention as it normally would. There’s so much drama going on, all the time, to focus on any one thing. Today Trump is busy making a mess of the Ukraine-Russia crisis and engaging in an undeclared and unauthorized war in Venezuela. Plus he’s bombing more boats in the Pacific now. Trump appears to be in denial that there’s anything fundamentally wrong with the economy, and his flickering attention span is elsewhere. Except that he’s still talking about giving Americans a “tariff dividend” of $2000, which would really be a payoff to dispose taxpayers toward voting Republican in the midterms. We’ll see.
Gallup says the public is in a gloomy mood. Gloomy enough to punish Republicans in 2026? I guess we’ll find out.
"Trump appears to be in denial that there’s anything fundamentally wrong with the economy, and his flickering attention span is elsewhere"
Oh, he has much more important things to fixate on, like the armrests over at his namesake center for the preforming arts! “Unlike anything ever done or seen before!
45IFADKQABCINFIOQQT77MQZFA.png (1440×1944)
uncledad, my brain left the 'm' out of armrests, and I thought Chuck Redd had been arrested for treason.
Would not have surprised me.
(My wife: "Don't give him any ideas!")
If the economy is bad, voters will probably punish the Republicans, and, I think the coming battles will focus on how bad the Republicans have been, e.g., the next government-stays-open will be fought over Obamacare credits. Shutdown, plus no credits, will really hurt the Republicans, unless they truly ace the messaging.
The one thing that bugs me, though, is, winning in '26 and '28 isn't really enough; we've already seen how vulnerable we are to a lawless President. Democrats should be bold, creating a public option, medicaid buy-in (those might be one and the same), Medicare buy-in at 55 (when insurance premiums spike due to heart attack, stroke, cancer, etc.), court reform, and probably low cost child care, nation wide. They should move fast and break things, and dare the Republicans to undo what they've done.
Except, even that isn't enough. When Republicans can murder people on the high seas, and don't even have to explain themselves, something is horribly wrong in this country, right? It's like, the Republican Party USA must become as toxic as the Nazi party, where people understand that it really matters when the President murders people, calls on the DOJ to prosecute his enemies, etc..
I read that Saks Fifth Ave, a Canadian-owned corporation, is looking to bankruptcy reorganization. This Christmas (I hear from a reliable source), they were shipping very little to their stores. No info on why – tariffs? Manufacturing is not seeing a revival. We will see preliminary numbers soon enough re Christmas sales, relative to previous years. I also wonder about Christmas debt – you can overspend if there's a boom in the next year, but the rumor of a boom will not translate into debt relief.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics released a report on Dec 11 – I presume the most recent, since nothing more recent came up in a search. The discussion was ENTIRELY based on September data. The shutdown was blamed in the report for the interruption, but the shutdown ended Nov 12. In the report released a month after the shutdown, they did nothing? If I were paranoid, I'd say they are not eager to release bad news.
Thanks for the link to Common Dreams. I ran into this writing by Michelle Ellner there which seemed quite sensible and well written.
Are we taking trade wars to the war crime level? The "art" in the art of the deal more properly termed extortion or some other criminal activity?
Yes, "we [are] taking trade wars to the war crime level"; IMO, we've been doing that for decades now. I've seen estimates saying that (Bill) Clinton's sanctions against Iraq in the 1990's led to 1/2-1 million deaths, which rivals Cheney/Bush's bodycount there.
Perhaps worse, our overuse of Sanctions fits the classic wry line: "it is worse than a crime, it is a blunder".
Partly, the problem was akin to bad use of anti-biotics: once some country survives our first-level Sanctions, we increase the dosage, but it's too late, they – and everybody else – has learned techniques for surviving.
But the bigger problem at this point is that we have sanctioned so many countries for so many things for so long that most of the rest of the world is sick of us, and they are slowly organizing to [semi-]collectively resist (see: BRICS, SCO, etc).
Most of this is only possible now because Wall Street sold our Manufacturing Base to China. Or, more accurately, because China recognized that the US would eventually try to keep them down via Sanctions, and carefully built supply chains to make sure that they would have all the resources they would need to resist.
When Trump recently [loudly] proclaimed some new Tariff on China, they [quietly] cut off our access to key Rare Earth metals. This worked not because they are the only country that *mines* those metals, but because they are the only country who *refines* them at scale. It would take the USA a decade to [re-]build refining capacity, and it would cost $Bs (and Wall Street would rather buy from China than risk reviving the UMW), so Trump [quietly] buried his Tariff threat.
It remains to be seen whether China will actively help Venezuela resist our piracy, sabotage, and other attacks. I don't think it's a coincidence that in the days following the US seizure of that ship carrying oil from Venezuela to China, there has been a spate of news about Chinese Naval development…
China Arms a Container Ship | Picket/Surveillance | First Strike | Cost Effective | Expendable
(I've also seen a flurry of stuff focused on China's capability for attacking Taiwan).
I don't think China will use its new Navy to protect Venezuela from direct US attacks. But they *will* continue to help South America build infrastructure which *will* give those countries more options for resisting future US attacks.
American Sanctions Are Now Benefiting Countries – Ian Welsh
Economic sanctions are predicated on the US dollar as the reserve currency, and the US financial system as the default clearing house, for international commerce. Lose these, and “sound and fury” become applicable.