By Denny Gulino
WASHINGTON (MaceNews) – A week of ordinary and not too consequential economic data, like October retail sales and housing starts, a US-China summit chat, the signing of BIF (Amtrak fans rejoice) and more socioeconomic angst reflected in a flurry of essays about America’s threatened civil war.
No one needs to be told consumption is strong or that the housing market is hot, as long as we’re talking about houses worth h half a million dollars or more. So market ripples promise to be few after the Tuesday and Wednesday morning reports.
By the way, it was refreshing to hear Friday from the president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank John Williams an echo of the frequent observations in this space of how deficient are U.S. government economic statistics. That’s despite the work of the BLS and BEA to move ahead and the fault of a chronically short-sighted set of congressional overseers.
As Mace News reported, Williams said the future is Big Data and artificial intelligence to furnish the improved research capabilities that can better support policy making, tools already available to many in the private sector.
U.S.-China trade relations are top of mind of U.S. business executives, many of whom seem to be puzzled about Monday evening’s Biden-Xi chat that has as its goal, says the White House, no “deliverables.” Having signaled more tariff exemptions weeks ago, nothing much has happened since, White House watchers have noted. Some happy talk about climate is expected, but that hardly outweighs near-term anxiety about China’s intentions toward Taiwan, toward some of its most successful large firms and their top executives or its troubled property market. The Rhodium Group’s essay in Foreign Affairs magazine this past week warned time may be running out for China’s economy.
Newsrooms are putting together fresh illustrated tables showing what’s in the $1.2 trillion of spending to be activated with President Biden’s very elaborate signing ceremony Monday. The ingredients, no matter how many times they’re enumerated, still haven’t seemed to sink in. On-board kitchens again on Amtrak along with many dozens of new destinations, connected by 83 new trains? That and much, much more.
Will retiring Republicans like Ohio’s Sen. Rob Portman, who voted for the package in the Senate and helped get 18 of his party’s Senate colleagues to do the same, show up for the signing? Sen. Susan Collins says she’ll be there. So that’s two. Can Lindsey Graham, who also voted in favor, enter the White House grounds controlled by Democrats? In the localities, Republican officials are only too anxious to start rebuilding, for instance, I-75’s Brent Spence bridge between Ohio and Kentucky.
Outside of Beltwayland, much confusion about whether this mammoth set of projects is bad or good or a mixture. Why are the House Republicans who voted for it getting death threats if it’s good? Why do surveys find so much support among the general public if it’s so bad? And how does it mesh with the Build Back Better program, even more demonized by Republicans and perhaps ready to be passed by the House this week. Read Eric Ham’s story about its doubtful future elsewhere on this site.
Recountings of the increasingly ugly side of partisanship, from the death threats to the prospect of U.S. urban violence a la three decades of ethno-nationalist “Troubles” in Northern Ireland, have been hard to miss over the weekend. The New York Times’ front page story Saturday recounted the turn toward viciousness, accompanied by the apocalyptic outline of coming battles between American militias and a supposedly conflicted U.S. military on the much-read aggregation site Drudge Report. For good measure Drudge also posted an essay by a senior adviser to the president of the RAND Corporation, again, seeing intimations of a coming civil war.
No great amount of research is necessary, though, to plumb the depths of American division. Just a glance at the hundreds of YouTube comments that accompanied Jen Psaki’s return to the White House podium Friday illustrated how obscene and malevolent routine social media discourse has become, notably, not all of it anonymous.
When court cases become culture war showcases and fulcrums of public policy multiple times a week – Rittenhouse, Arbery, Charlottesville – you know relatively few people these days outside of those fixated on the markets are hanging on reports about retail sales, housing starts, leading indicators or jobless claims.
You also know that a large set of Americans are afraid of becoming vulnerable, to “others,” inflation, Covid, authorities, change, Another large set are reminded they are already vulnerable and powerless. The rest? Largely apathetic bystanders. Put it together though, a volatile mix.
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Contact this writer: denny@macenews.com. Opinions expressed are solely those of the author.
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