Biden's Inflation and the Credit Card Explosion
Under Biden, costs soar and incomes cannot keep pace. Debt rises and interest service costs are about to leap...
How have Americans coped with the fastest rise in prices in 4 decades? For a lot of people, especially those of modest incomes, the answer is simple and potentially dangerous: credit cards.
Before a look at that data and the looming risks of surging credit card debt for consumers, consider just how pervasive the overall inflation quagmire is right now. Joe Biden received an incredible economic handoff from his predecessor. The 45th president led the Trump Boom 2.0, an economic rebound from the doldrums of the Spring 2020 lockdowns that generated a massive economic resurgence without producing any material inflation. For some of the evidence, have a look at the widely watched Purchasing Managers Index for Manufacturing in America. Note both the trajectory of the Trump renaissance and then the subsequent dreadful rollover and decline under Joe Biden for Manufacturing, see the data (chart from TradingEconomics.com):
The chart on inflation reveals a similar theme, stability under Trump and then chaos under Biden. Specifically, even as the economy aggressively reopened, especially in freedom jurisdictions like Florida and Tennessee, overall prices remained muted. For each of the last 6 months of Trump’s term, the CPI Consumer Price Index remained at 1.40% or lower, see the evidence (chart from St. Louis Fed):
Then, once the Biden/Harris White House teamed up with Pelosi and Schumer, this Triumvirate of Terrible implemented an aggressive inflationary policy agenda that included 3 massive price-spiking blunders:
a. War on American Domestic Energy
b. Exorbitant Borrowing and Spending
c. Onerous Vaccine Mandates that deterred work, especially in logistics
As a result, costs soared for everything. Crude Oil just hit 8-year highs. Apartment rents rose at an astounding 18% in 2021, as I detailed in this Chalk Talk:
Regarding the demand for physical goods, global capital smartly pours into anything tangible, anything commodity based as a protection against Biden’s corrosive Inflation. In fact, the longtime head of Commodity Research for Wall Street’s leading bank, Goldman Sachs, recently declared that: “I’ve been doing this 30 years, and I’ve never seen markets like this…We’re out of everything. I don’t care if it’s oil, gas, coal, copper, aluminum; you name it, we’re out of it.”
As a consequence, many Consumers, dealing with the sudden trap of falling Real Wages (meaning adjusted for inflation), effectively financed the difference. These workers only absorbed the higher costs they face via high-interest loans from credit cards.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Cortes Investigates to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.