What a real recession looked like...
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/trumps-econom...d=74760051
Economists say Trump’s economic legacy will be defined by his failure in leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic that exacerbated the financial downturn, domestic policies that overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy, and international trade policies that hurt U.S. industry while simultaneously alienating allies.
By attempting to implement economic policy through the so-called "art of the deal" and ignoring lessons that many economists have learned over the last 50 years -- such as the importance of Fed independence, the effects of large budget deficits on trade deficits, the value of multilateral institutions such as the World Trade Organization and more -- he failed to achieve his own self-proclaimed goals of reducing the trade deficit with China, controlling the national debt or strengthening the American manufacturing sector.
Here is a look at the outgoing president's legacy on the U.S. economy.
Coronavirus response
Trump inherited an economy from the Obama administration that was expanding, and it continued to do so during the first three years of his presidency. While real wage growth was slow or stagnant for most Americans, and had been under Obama, unemployment continued to trend downward and GDP continued to grow.
In the last year of Trump’s presidency, the unemployment rate reached a 50-year low of 3.5% in February. The coronavirus pandemic soon walloped the economy, forcing swaths of businesses across the country to close. The unemployment rate skyrocketed to 14.7% in April. It receded to 6.7% as of last month but remains above the level of 4.8% when Trump took office in 2016.
Moreover, millions of jobs lost during the pandemic may not come back anytime soon.
Actually they did, also with 3.6% unemployment which you never see during a recession.
As the pandemic raged in the U.S., however, Trump consistently downplayed its severity. Instead of focusing on getting the virus under control, he concentrated on reopening the economy and several surges in the virus followed, including the most severe as he leaves office.
Trump admitted he deliberately played down coronavirus threat:
The lack of leadership during the health crisis was not only deadly -- with thousands of Americans dying every day -- but also disastrous for the economy.
Other countries such as China and South Korea were better able to control the spread of the virus. As a result Chinese GDP is forecasted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to increase by 1.8%, and Korean GDP is forecasted to fall by only 1.1% -- considerably less than the 3.7% drop forecast for the U.S.
The Chinese Communist Party's ironclad pandemic response was notably much stricter than many democratic nations including the U.S. The U.S.'s GDP forecast is on par with G20 nations, which all together are forecast to have a 3.8% drop in GDP.
“There are many countries that have made mistakes, but there are some countries that have done it right,” Jeffrey Frankel, James W. Harpel Professor of Capital Formation and Growth at Harvard University's Kennedy School, told ABC News.
Frankel cited the numerous times Trump didn’t take the virus seriously “and actively undermined the practices that we need, like avoiding large crowds, masks and so on” as evidence that the president was not taking the crisis seriously as a policy matter.
“You can't leave something like that entirely to the free market, certainly, or to the states,” Frankel said .
Heidi Shierholz, a former chief economist at the Department of Labor and the current senior economist and policy director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute think tank in Washington, D.C., told ABC News, "The utter lack of a coherent, effective response to COVID has just done enormous damage to the economy."
The COVID-19 economic downturn has also made racial inequity worse, Shierholz added, and "hurt Black and Brown communities far worse, not just from a health perspective, but also from the perspective of job loss."
Communities of color bore the brunt of essential work during the crisis, risking exposure to the virus.
The unemployment rate for white workers was 6% last month compared to 9.9% for Black workers and 9.3% for Hispanic workers.
Jobs that could be done at home also tended to require higher levels of education and to be higher paying, according to research from the University of Chicago. By failing to effectively control the virus, Trump’s economy favored the wealthy at the expense of lower-paid service workers employed by hotels, restaurants, hairdressers, and other businesses requiring face-to-face contact.
GDP Growth Under Trump Was the Worst Since Hoover
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/20...depression
The pandemic was partly to blame, and there are some measures that make his record look better. But it was not a stellar performance.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/20...depression
All of those top performers except Reagan were Democrats, which has not gone unnoticed by economists. Over the nearly 75 years for which we have reliable quarterly GDP and monthly jobs numbers, the growth of both has been markedly faster during Democratic presidencies than Republican ones. In 2016 the very eminent Alan S. Blinder and Mark W. Watson of Princeton undertook “An Econometric Exploration” of this phenomenon for the American Economic Review and came to the not especially helpful conclusion that:
the Democratic edge stems mainly from more benign oil shocks, superior total factor productivity (TFP) performance, a more favorable international environment, and perhaps more optimistic consumer expectations about the near-term future.
That sounds mainly as if the Democrats have just been luckier, and perhaps better at inculcating optimism. In an updated analysis earlier this year, David Leonhardt of the New York Times suggested that it might also have something to do with Democrats being more pragmatic than Republicans, who since 1980 have focused on tax cuts as the main instrument of national economic policy, or with Democratic economic pressure groups such as labor unions favoring policies “that lift broad-based economic growth” while Republican economic pressure groups focus, again, on tax cuts.
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/trumps-econom...d=74760051
Economists say Trump’s economic legacy will be defined by his failure in leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic that exacerbated the financial downturn, domestic policies that overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy, and international trade policies that hurt U.S. industry while simultaneously alienating allies.
By attempting to implement economic policy through the so-called "art of the deal" and ignoring lessons that many economists have learned over the last 50 years -- such as the importance of Fed independence, the effects of large budget deficits on trade deficits, the value of multilateral institutions such as the World Trade Organization and more -- he failed to achieve his own self-proclaimed goals of reducing the trade deficit with China, controlling the national debt or strengthening the American manufacturing sector.
Here is a look at the outgoing president's legacy on the U.S. economy.
Coronavirus response
Trump inherited an economy from the Obama administration that was expanding, and it continued to do so during the first three years of his presidency. While real wage growth was slow or stagnant for most Americans, and had been under Obama, unemployment continued to trend downward and GDP continued to grow.
In the last year of Trump’s presidency, the unemployment rate reached a 50-year low of 3.5% in February. The coronavirus pandemic soon walloped the economy, forcing swaths of businesses across the country to close. The unemployment rate skyrocketed to 14.7% in April. It receded to 6.7% as of last month but remains above the level of 4.8% when Trump took office in 2016.
Moreover, millions of jobs lost during the pandemic may not come back anytime soon.
Actually they did, also with 3.6% unemployment which you never see during a recession.
As the pandemic raged in the U.S., however, Trump consistently downplayed its severity. Instead of focusing on getting the virus under control, he concentrated on reopening the economy and several surges in the virus followed, including the most severe as he leaves office.
Trump admitted he deliberately played down coronavirus threat:
The lack of leadership during the health crisis was not only deadly -- with thousands of Americans dying every day -- but also disastrous for the economy.
Other countries such as China and South Korea were better able to control the spread of the virus. As a result Chinese GDP is forecasted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to increase by 1.8%, and Korean GDP is forecasted to fall by only 1.1% -- considerably less than the 3.7% drop forecast for the U.S.
The Chinese Communist Party's ironclad pandemic response was notably much stricter than many democratic nations including the U.S. The U.S.'s GDP forecast is on par with G20 nations, which all together are forecast to have a 3.8% drop in GDP.
“There are many countries that have made mistakes, but there are some countries that have done it right,” Jeffrey Frankel, James W. Harpel Professor of Capital Formation and Growth at Harvard University's Kennedy School, told ABC News.
Frankel cited the numerous times Trump didn’t take the virus seriously “and actively undermined the practices that we need, like avoiding large crowds, masks and so on” as evidence that the president was not taking the crisis seriously as a policy matter.
“You can't leave something like that entirely to the free market, certainly, or to the states,” Frankel said .
Heidi Shierholz, a former chief economist at the Department of Labor and the current senior economist and policy director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute think tank in Washington, D.C., told ABC News, "The utter lack of a coherent, effective response to COVID has just done enormous damage to the economy."
The COVID-19 economic downturn has also made racial inequity worse, Shierholz added, and "hurt Black and Brown communities far worse, not just from a health perspective, but also from the perspective of job loss."
Communities of color bore the brunt of essential work during the crisis, risking exposure to the virus.
The unemployment rate for white workers was 6% last month compared to 9.9% for Black workers and 9.3% for Hispanic workers.
Jobs that could be done at home also tended to require higher levels of education and to be higher paying, according to research from the University of Chicago. By failing to effectively control the virus, Trump’s economy favored the wealthy at the expense of lower-paid service workers employed by hotels, restaurants, hairdressers, and other businesses requiring face-to-face contact.
GDP Growth Under Trump Was the Worst Since Hoover
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/20...depression
The pandemic was partly to blame, and there are some measures that make his record look better. But it was not a stellar performance.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/20...depression
All of those top performers except Reagan were Democrats, which has not gone unnoticed by economists. Over the nearly 75 years for which we have reliable quarterly GDP and monthly jobs numbers, the growth of both has been markedly faster during Democratic presidencies than Republican ones. In 2016 the very eminent Alan S. Blinder and Mark W. Watson of Princeton undertook “An Econometric Exploration” of this phenomenon for the American Economic Review and came to the not especially helpful conclusion that:
the Democratic edge stems mainly from more benign oil shocks, superior total factor productivity (TFP) performance, a more favorable international environment, and perhaps more optimistic consumer expectations about the near-term future.
That sounds mainly as if the Democrats have just been luckier, and perhaps better at inculcating optimism. In an updated analysis earlier this year, David Leonhardt of the New York Times suggested that it might also have something to do with Democrats being more pragmatic than Republicans, who since 1980 have focused on tax cuts as the main instrument of national economic policy, or with Democratic economic pressure groups such as labor unions favoring policies “that lift broad-based economic growth” while Republican economic pressure groups focus, again, on tax cuts.
