Axios reports, Corporate profits hit a new record high in 2021:
Corporate profits hit another record in 2021, though the breakneck pace of growth slowed sharply during the fourth quarter.
This shows that companies have been able to overcome the inflationary wave flowing through the U.S. economy — and even profit from it.
Companies complained loudly about rising costs for raw materials and labor for most of 2021, but data released yesterday by the Commerce Department show that they passed those costs along — and then some [profiteering, price gouging].
For the full year 2021, pre-tax profits rose 25% to roughly $2.81 trillion, handily outpacing the 7% rise in consumer prices over the same stretch.
But the pace of growth slowed sharply in Q4, as profits inched up only 0.7% from Q3 (to an annualized pace of $2.94 trillion) — which could mean that the long-awaited pinch on profits from higher prices is starting.
WRONG. This was the effect of the Omicron variant surge on consumer spending during the fourth quarter of 2021. This is now clearly behind us in the first quarter of 2022, with a robust economic recovery continuing unabated.
Jennifer Rubin writes, Biden’s economy is extraordinary. But inflation is still the Achilles’ heel of Democrats.
For the 11th-straight month, the U.S. economy in March added at least 400,000 jobs. That’s simply extraordinary. And job growth shows little sign of slowing anytime soon.
The Post reports: “The U.S. labor market extended its streak of unprecedented growth, adding 431,000 jobs in March and sending the unemployment rate to a new pandemic low of 3.6 percent.” The January and February job numbers were adjusted upward by a total of roughly 100,000, raising the total job count under the Biden economy to 7.9 million.
In a remarkably short period of time — far sooner than virtually all respected prognosticators expected — the United States has recaptured nearly all (93 percent) of jobs lost during the coronavirus pandemic. President Biden on Friday touted the “fastest decline in unemployment to start a president’s term ever recorded.” In addition, wages went up an impressive 5.6 percent in the last year, allowing Biden to declared that “we’re the only country in the world that’s comes out of crises stronger than we went into them. That’s what we’re doing here.”
Not all is rosy, however. Wages have surged, but inflation is rising faster. In February, prices were 7.9 percent higher than a year prior. That means the vast majority of Americans who never lost their jobs during the pandemic may be in a worse position now than before the economy tanked. Couple that with an almost daily reminder that the cost of food, gas, housing and most everything else has gone up, and it’s easy to understand why so many people think the state of the economy is poor despite record-level job creation.
While Republicans like to blame the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan for inflation, that alone did not overheat our $25 trillion economy. If we want to play the blame game, we should start with the Federal Reserve, whose mandate is to control inflation.
It’s small comfort that Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell admits he was surprised that inflation was not “transitory.” The Fed deployed a host of extraordinary measures to buoy the economy during the pandemic, of which keeping interest rates to almost zero was just one. It also made direct loans to city and state governments, businesses and banks; utilized quantitative easing; and set up an array of credit facilities. As a result, Brookings Institution experts explain, “by the end of 2021, inflation was well above the Fed’s 2% target and labor markets were nearing the Fed’s ‘maximum employment’ target.”
In colloquial terms, the Fed should have taken away the punch bowl far sooner. Then came the war in Ukraine, which sent already rising fuel costs even higher. Biden has a legitimate argument that his spending plan only contributed a tiny sliver of the 7.9 percent inflation rate. By one estimate, the plan only increased inflation by 0.35 percentage points.
From a political standpoint, however, a president cannot claim to have rescued the economy but bear little responsibility for inflation. Moreover, it is hard to get voters to appreciate what did not happen because of his rescue package. We didn’t see extended high unemployment. Thousands of businesses were kept open. Millions of Americans avoided eviction. Millions of kids were kept out of poverty. And most schools didn’t remain shut last year.
Biden has been striving to show he understands inflation is painful. For a time, he nibbled around the edges, primarily working on supply-chain issues. This past week, he marked a turning point, announcing a massive scheme to release 1 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and to penalize oil companies that leave leased public lands untapped. (The latter will need congressional approval and will likely fail to get support from Republicans, who remain cozy with the fossil-fuel industry.) If this works to increase supply and bring down fuel costs (in conjunction with market-driven increases in rig activity), Biden may get some credit.
Looking at the big picture, Biden’s economic record is extraordinary, but it is marred by inflation. Whether responsible or not for the latter, Biden is unlikely to improve the public’s surly mood until inflation abates. That is bad news for Democrats’ chances in the midterms, but if the Fed brings down inflation without driving the country into a recession, Biden’s economic record may be viewed as one of the most successful in history. That is a big “if.”
Eric Boehlert adds at Press Run, Why is the press rooting against Biden?
Biden is currently on pace, during his first two full years in office, to oversee the creation of 10 million new jobs and an unemployment rate tumbling all the way down to 3 percent. That would be an unprecedented accomplishment in U.S. history. Context: In four years in office, Trump lost three million jobs, the worst record since Herbert Hoover.
Yet the press shrugs off the good news, determined to keep Biden pinned down. “The reality is that one strong jobs report does not snap the administration out of its current circumstances,” Politico stressed Friday afternoon. How about 11 straight strong job reports, would that do the trick? Because the U.S. economy under Biden has been adding more than 400,000 jobs per month for 11 straight months.
The glaring disconnect between reality and how the press depicts White House accomplishments means a key question lingers: Why is the press rooting against Biden? Is the press either hoping for a Trump return to the White House, or at least committed to keeping Biden down so the 2024 rematch will be close and ‘entertaining’ for the press to cover? Is that why the Ginni Thomas insurrection story was politely marched off the stage after just a few days of coverage last week by the same news outlets that are now in year three of their dogged Hunter Biden reporting? (“ABC This Week” included 19 references to Hunter Biden yesterday.)
Just look at the relentlessly dour economic coverage. For the press, inflation remains the dominant, bad-news-for-Dems economic story. Even on Friday, the day the stellar jobs report was released, “inflation” was mentioned on cable news nearly as often as “jobs,” according to TVeyes.com.
The media is recklessly and irresponsibly feeding inflation psychology, which can become a self-fufilling prophecy. The media is a factor in inflation. Will they ever accept responsibility for their own damaging actions?
Axios contorted itself by claiming Biden’s promise to add “millions” of new jobs (which he’s already accomplished), was being threatened because there aren’t enough workers, because so few people are out of work— or something.
The home-run report itself was often depicted as a mixed bag. These were some of the glass-half-empty headlines that appeared in the wake of the latest runaway numbers:
• “America’s Job Market Is On Fire. Here’s Why It Doesn’t Feel Like It” (CNN)
• “Booming Job Growth Is a Double-Edged Sword For Joe Biden” (CNN)
• “Why a Great Jobs Report Can’t Save Joe Biden” (CNN)
• “Unemployment Hits Pandemic Low in March, But Uncertainty Looms Ahead” (Washington Post)
• “Biden Gets a Strong Jobs Report, But a Sour Mood Still Prevails” (Washington Post)
Totally normal journalism, right? The president announces another blockbuster jobs report and the press presents it as borderline bad news.
Note that the above headlines about the sour mood prevailing despite the great jobs, and how uncertainty looms, came from the Post, the same outlet that slotted the March jobs report into 87th placed on its website on Friday.
That afternoon readers on the daily’s homepage had to scroll down 87 headlines before they saw the first reference to the great economic news. Among the headlines that ran higher on the Post site that afternoon were, “What’s The Best Way to Share My Old Home Videos?” and “The Duke-North Carolina Rivalry, By the Numbers.”
On-air, CNN also downplayed the jobs report, according to Dean Baker, senior economist for Center for Economic and Policy Research. “CNN’s coverage of the report quickly turned to inflation,” he wrote. “In its more general coverage of the economy, the jobs report — which tells us about the employment and earnings situation for more than 160 million people — was barely a blip.”
Sunday’s “Meet the Press” [with Chuck Todd, the lamest analyst in the business] round table featured two segments with assembled pundits. One focused on how immigration might be a problem for Democrats in the midterms [a promo foreshadowing Chucky’s parroting of GQP talking points in the coming months], the other on how Trump might be a problem for Democrats [you mean Republicans?] in the midterms. As usual, Biden’s historic economic record was ignored.
That’s why, according to a recent poll, 37 percent of Americans think the economy lost jobs over the last year, when it’s gained 7 million. (Just 28 percent of people know jobs were up.)
Virtually all the Beltway coverage today agrees on this central point: When it comes to the economy, Biden’s approval rating is taking a hit because Americans are freaked out by inflation. But maybe it’s taking a hit because Americans are under the false impression that jobs are disappearing. Voters don’t know what they don’t know because the press isn’t interested in telling them about record job success and an economy that’s years ahead of where experts thought it would be coming out of a global pandemic.
Biden is facing not just one organized opposition in the form of the GOP, but another in the form of the Beltway press corps.
Last week, they hit Biden with 14 separate questions at a press briefing over the supposed “gaffe” he made, expressing his moral outrage over the mass killings Russian President Vladimir Putn has unleashed in Ukraine. So focused on trying to trip up Biden, the press didn’t ask a single question about the state of the Ukraine war.
And remember all winter how the press treated Covid as the most important “crisis” Biden faced and hung the pandemic around his neck? Today, the topic has vanished, the press has given the White House no credit for steering the country back to normalcy, and instead has latched onto gas prices as being a defining issue under Biden. The buried Covid coverage represents a telling example of how an issue that the press itself claimed would define the Biden administration gets translated into no news when it turns towards positive territory.
The Beltway press needs to take its thumb off the Biden scale.
Beltway media bias.
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