Uh, How Bad Is the Economy?

Farmers are in trouble. Costs are up. Sales are down. A lot of them voted to deport their own workers and now are mad that’s happening. Prices are down too, because Trump’s trade war crushed exported food demand and China stopped buying billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. soybeans–a move that happened before and precipitated a farmer bailout in Trump Trade War 1. Trump has already admitted his own policies hurt the economy, and no one should be shocked that’s where this has all been trending. Now after firing the head Bureau of Labor statistician because she produced figures that dear leader didn’t like, Trump has a new idea to shield economic knowledge from everyone.

“Subject to SEC Approval,” wrote Trump in a TruthSocial diktat. “Companies and Corporations should no longer be forced to ‘Report’ on a quarterly basis (Quarterly Reporting!), but rather to Report on a ‘Six (6) Month Basis.’” He claims that “This will save money, and allow managers to focus on properly running their companies,” proving that at some point, one of his advisers gave him an economics 101 lesson and explained how all these economic revisions usually happen. This is something of a classic Trump post in a time where he’s clearly running out of gas, where he makes a salient point about a genuinely inefficient system that produces two different reporting periods based on the size of the business and thus, confusing figures–but that logic has abso-fucking-loutely nothing to do with why the manbaby is posting what he’s posting. These revisions made him big mad because they tell a pretty concise economic story throughout the year, and it’s unflattering for dear leader. That’s why they have to go, not because he soberly read the Long-Term Stock Exchange’s assessment of the inefficient quarterly system and decided they had a point.

The economy is slowing down. Every jobs report is being revised downwards later. Bond yields, something which were rising over inflationary fears due to Trump’s trade war and the GOP’s murder bill blowing out the deficit, have been falling quite a bit the past month over deflationary fears due to Trump’s trade war and the inevitability of Trump appointing himself as Fed Chair and bringing ZIRP back. Trump’s tariffs are a broad-based tax on economic activity, the largest of its kind since 1934, and the weak economic growth figures being produced are what economists would expect when you burden everyone with such a huge economic drag like these. Five percent is a lot in finance. Seventeen percent is a recession, at least.

I can tell you that this economic uncertainty has even made it down to our little pocket of the internet, as while our recent budget cuts were mainly driven by the traffic apocalypse Google’s AI is presenting for websites ranging from Splinter to Forbes, when this trade war began, our advertisers let us know they were feeling a bit skittish. Nothing actionable happened, but the mood about future money and where that would go changed into a ‘who knows, man’ kind of posture. The sheer uncertainty Trump presented in his promise to raise tariffs today so he can lower them at some point in the future wrecked budgets in industries across the entire economy. Widespread belt-tightening ensued, demonstrated by the general hiring freeze in America this year, bringing GDP figures down well below last year’s pace of 2.4 percent with it.

And as long as Trump’s trade war is putting a chill on the long-term domestic investment he says this whole bout of madness is about, the economy will continue to slow. The big policy problem Trump has created for himself is expressed in his naivete in his war with the Fed’s independence and threats to upend the entire theoretical model of the global financial system. His added taxes that are paid by American importers and their customers are creating indirect deflationary pressure through its uncertainty forcing people to spend less and hoard more cash ($7.5 trillion is currently sitting in money market funds, an all-time high). These tariffs themselves are also creating direct inflationary pressure by adding a surcharge to everything imported into the world’s biggest importer. This is why the Fed has been cautious to cut rates this year, infuriating Trump. Typically, you cut rates to stimulate economic growth, and raise them to tame inflation–the question stagflation asks is: what happens when you have both slowing growth and rising inflation? Welcome to Trump’s economy, filled with all the worst ideas from the 1930s and the 1970s.

This is crazy. We’re living through the breakdown of the post-World War II order. It’s all being destroyed by Trump or left behind by a present that clearly has no need for the West Wing cosplay of the late 20th century. The economy is also undergoing its own Trumpian makeover, and if it breaks, GOP support could follow. Given that it is already breaking in rural areas like Nebraska and Iowa where rural hospitals are closing due to GOP Medicaid cuts just as “what we’re seeing is basically a recession economy” takes hold, the GOP could wind up with a ton of disaffected voters not willing to show up for them on election day. I know it sounds unbelievable, but I come from the generation old enough to remember the day Indiana turned blue. This country’s only consistency is that it will consistently surprise you.

No one with any news worth bragging about wants to restrict the amount of time they get to brag about it, especially when that thing is the thing all politicians work tirelessly to find ways to brag about. Trump can talk a big game about how he wants the world to operate on a more cost-effective timeline that also allows him a greater ability to mold economic reality into his and the GOP’s safe space, but the market is addicted to short-term sugar highs. It needs quarterly reporting cycles just as a matter of the only principle it has left outside a worship of the ZIRP gods above all else. If this reporting change happens, Olympus truly has fallen. The economy is always an opaque creature, impossible to get a firm grasp on the totality of it, but when the man who says he’s in charge of it says he would like everyone to tell you less about the economy, that may be all you need to know about it.