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Under Biden, the vaccine rollout has been faster than expected at more than 3 million shots a day the past couple of weeks. “Biden gets props for getting the vaccine process sped up,” Moody says.
He also spearheaded the latest $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package, passed by Congress in March, that includes another round of $1,400 stimulus checks. The Treasury Department says it has disbursed 161 million of those payments totaling $379 billion. All told, Americans are flush with an additional $2.4 trillion that they’ve squirreled way during the outbreak and they’re ready to spend much of it just as the economy is getting back on its feet.
Put simply, the president helped put a strong recovery on steroids. “We can give Biden credit for improving consumer and business confidence,” says Bernard Baumohl, chief economist of the Economic Outlook Group.
U.S. employers added 460,000 jobs in February and 916,000 in March, cutting short what was supposed to be a dark winter for the economy after 306,000 job losses in December. Nearly half the gains were in leisure and hospitality, which was decimated by the health crisis and includes restaurants, bars and hotels.
The U.S. has recovered 13.9 million, or 62%, of the 22.4 million jobs lost last spring as eateries and other businesses shuttered by the outbreak have reopened or increased capacity limits, Labor Department figures show.
“A faster vaccine rollout and further fiscal stimulus have accelerated activity,” Morgan Stanley wrote in a note to clients. Moody expects more than 1 million job gains each month this spring and a return to the pre-COVID-19 employment level sometime next year. Morgan Stanley expects the economy to grow 7.5% this year – most since 1984 – and Oxford Economics forecasts a record 7 million job gains.
Retail sales overall are now 17% above their pre-pandemic level. The strong report led Morgan Stanley to raise its forecast for consumer spending growth in the first quarter to 10.6%. It upgraded its estimate for first-quarter economic growth to 9.7%.
After falling to a six-year low in April 2020, consumer confidence surged the past couple of months as stimulus checks flooded bank accounts, and it’s now modestly below its pre-pandemic level. Americans’ view of both present conditions and their expectations for the next six months brightened.
Fourteen percent of those surveyed plan to buy a car in the next six months, up from 10.2% in February, and 8.9% intend to buy a home, up from 6%, according to the Conference Board.
In March, housing starts jumped 19.4% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.74 million, highest since 2006, Census data shows.
Overall, business spending has rocketed higher since last spring and is 10.4% above the pre-crisis mark.
Manufacturing production rose 2.7% in March, recovering just part of the weather-related 3.7% drop in February, Federal Reserve figures show. Generally, manufacturing has more than rebounded from its pandemic lows as factories meet consumer demand for electronics and other goods in the home-centered economy.
Since Biden was elected Nov. 3, the Standard & Poor’s 500 index is up 24% after hitting a record 4,187 at Monday's close. The broad market index was already on a tear and has soared 87% since hitting its nadir in March 2020, shortly after the pandemic first upended the economy.
Initially, stocks rebounded much faster than the economy, driven by tech companies such as Apple and Amazon that were thriving in the new stay-at-home reality. Since late last year, growing vaccinations and the prospect of a reopening economy have juiced the market, a dynamic Biden has stoked with more stimulus and widespread COVID-19 shots.
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/2...331851002/
That's why I don't get the doom and gloom from some on the economy. Its only going to improve the farther we get out of the COVID fog. But my guess is a lot of the 'doomsayers' are really just Trumpers trying to shit in Biden's cornflakes. The only thing I'll say is comparing numbers from the same time last year is kind of goofy as we had an unprecedented shutdown with the pandemic. But having said that, if we didn't have this global goods transportation crisis, the economy would even be better. I work with consumer durable goods and its a complete shit show worldwide with getting containers shipped from overseas and the trucking freight industry here in the U.S. under such pressure.
The Stock Market is on fire. My wife and I will be retiring in 4-5 years and we just now started the process of lowering risk and started to put stopgaps in place that would mitigate any kind of large losses with our investment portfolios. We got lucky, is the bottom line: we started investing in a significant way in late 2008, right when the shit hit the fan. The Dow closed at 8634.06 then.....its now at 36,634. You can imagine how good a time its been to invest, probably unprecedented in history. And every time it fluctuated downward, our financial guy said BUY when the market is low. And keep BUYING. So we did. And he really had to convince us because we were skittish. And now if I have a grandson, I'm going to push VERY hard for him to be named Marc (financial advisor person). :p
Legit concerns about debt, but we can allow ourselves a moment of respite in what's been a shitty time in our history.
Quote: @StickyBun said:
That's why I don't get the doom and gloom from some on the economy. Its only going to improve the farther we get out of the COVID fog. But my guess is a lot of the 'doomsayers' are really just Trumpers trying to shit in Biden's cornflakes. The only thing I'll say is comparing numbers from the same time last year is kind of goofy as we had an unprecedented shutdown with the pandemic. But having said that, if we didn't have this global goods transportation crisis, the economy would even be better. I work with consumer durable goods and its a complete shit show worldwide with getting containers shipped from overseas and the trucking freight industry here in the U.S. under such pressure.
The Stock Market is on fire. My wife and I will be retiring in 4-5 years and we just now started the process of lowering risk and started to put stopgaps in place that would mitigate any kind of large losses with our investment portfolios. We got lucky, is the bottom line: we started investing in a significant way in late 2008, right when the shit hit the fan. The Dow closed at 8634.06 then.....its now at 36,634. You can imagine how good a time its been to invest, probably unprecedented in history. And every time it fluctuated downward, our financial guy said BUY when the market is low. And keep BUYING. So we did. And he really had to convince us because we were skittish. And now if I have a grandson, I'm going to push VERY hard for him to be named Marc (financial advisor person). :p
I typically just let my 401K ride. But in the last 35 years, I've made four big financial decisions on my own...
1. Decided to invest $1,000 in Apple in 1998. Steve Jobs had just returned. Out of laziness, however, I never pulled the trigger. Still kicking myself.
2. In 2003 bought a house in the Berkeley neighborhood of Denver. It's now worth nearly 4 times what I paid for it, and the amount I'm able to charge in rent is almost embarrassing.
3. Decided to invest $5,000 in GE (and a couple others) at the bottom of the recession in 2008/2009. When I sold a few years later they had gone up about 10 fold. I just wish I had put more into it.
4. Last week I decided to invest in the Vikings. Severely underrated by the folks in Vegas, Vikings are my next big pay day. We'll see..... :-)
I'm sure you'll find plenty of Trumpers to shit on the economy but lets be honest. Its going good because we're coming out of the pandemic. Most economic forecasts I saw had us between 4-6.5% GDP growth. We could go without a president and have a good economy with that much growth.
Had Trump been reelected he would have negatively affected the vaccine rollout but he was 100% in on the stimulus so I think that would have happened with or without him.
If I have concerns with the economy its that we have significant inflation right now. If the Fed doesn't work to cool some of that inflation with a rise in interest rates we'll be setting ourselves up for one hell of a recession. At some point $10 2x4s become an issue. If ti wasn't for massive gains in housing we wouldn't be seeing houses continuing to be built at 200-300%$ over runs vs where they were pre-pandemic.
You also wont get the unemployment rate to come down until we cut off bonus unemployment. There are democrats screeching for ANOTHER round of bonus unemployment.
Quote: @AGRforever said:
I'm sure you'll find plenty of Trumpers to shit on the economy but lets be honest. Its going good because we're coming out of the pandemic. Most economic forecasts I saw had us between 4-6.5% GDP growth. We could go without a president and have a good economy with that much growth.
Had Trump been reelected he would have negatively affected the vaccine rollout but he was 100% in on the stimulus so I think that would have happened with or without him.
If I have concerns with the economy its that we have significant inflation right now. If the Fed doesn't work to cool some of that inflation with a rise in interest rates we'll be setting ourselves up for one hell of a recession. At some point $10 2x4s become an issue. If ti wasn't for massive gains in housing we wouldn't be seeing houses continuing to be built at 200-300%$ over runs vs where they were pre-pandemic.
You also wont get the unemployment rate to come down until we cut off bonus unemployment. There are democrats screeching for ANOTHER round of bonus unemployment.
The unemployment rate has been going down since August of last year.....should be close to 6.0 or under when the statistics come out for May later this month. The stimulus money will dry up soon and you'll see it get closer to 5.0 or under. But don't expect it to get back to 3.5 or thereabouts as some businesses died during COVID and won't be coming back.
Yeah, inflation is going up. It was 4.2% in April but keep in mind that it was 3.2% back in 2011. But the Fed has abandoned price stability and its time for Congress to kick them in the ass.
Based on the jobs reports, it seems an odd time to be crowing.
Quote: @StickyBun said:
@ AGRforever said:
I'm sure you'll find plenty of Trumpers to shit on the economy but lets be honest. Its going good because we're coming out of the pandemic. Most economic forecasts I saw had us between 4-6.5% GDP growth. We could go without a president and have a good economy with that much growth.
Had Trump been reelected he would have negatively affected the vaccine rollout but he was 100% in on the stimulus so I think that would have happened with or without him.
If I have concerns with the economy its that we have significant inflation right now. If the Fed doesn't work to cool some of that inflation with a rise in interest rates we'll be setting ourselves up for one hell of a recession. At some point $10 2x4s become an issue. If ti wasn't for massive gains in housing we wouldn't be seeing houses continuing to be built at 200-300%$ over runs vs where they were pre-pandemic.
You also wont get the unemployment rate to come down until we cut off bonus unemployment. There are democrats screeching for ANOTHER round of bonus unemployment.
The unemployment rate has been going down since August of last year.....should be close to 6.0 or under when the statistics come out for May later this month. The stimulus money will dry up soon and you'll see it get closer to 5.0 or under. But don't expect it to get back to 3.5 or thereabouts as some businesses died during COVID and won't be coming back.
Yeah, inflation is going up. It was 4.2% in April but keep in mind that it was 3.2% back in 2011. But the Fed has abandoned price stability and its time for Congress to kick them in the ass.
We're not getting back back to 3.5 unemployment anytime soon. That was at historic lows and can't be expected regardless who is in office.
I doubt congress will do anything about the Fed. They are the true rulers or America. Want a recession. Dial it up. Want to inflate stock returns. Not hard. We haven't been in control of our destiny in a long long time.
Quote: @AGRforever said:
@ StickyBun said:
@ AGRforever said:
I'm sure you'll find plenty of Trumpers to shit on the economy but lets be honest. Its going good because we're coming out of the pandemic. Most economic forecasts I saw had us between 4-6.5% GDP growth. We could go without a president and have a good economy with that much growth.
Had Trump been reelected he would have negatively affected the vaccine rollout but he was 100% in on the stimulus so I think that would have happened with or without him.
If I have concerns with the economy its that we have significant inflation right now. If the Fed doesn't work to cool some of that inflation with a rise in interest rates we'll be setting ourselves up for one hell of a recession. At some point $10 2x4s become an issue. If ti wasn't for massive gains in housing we wouldn't be seeing houses continuing to be built at 200-300%$ over runs vs where they were pre-pandemic.
You also wont get the unemployment rate to come down until we cut off bonus unemployment. There are democrats screeching for ANOTHER round of bonus unemployment.
The unemployment rate has been going down since August of last year.....should be close to 6.0 or under when the statistics come out for May later this month. The stimulus money will dry up soon and you'll see it get closer to 5.0 or under. But don't expect it to get back to 3.5 or thereabouts as some businesses died during COVID and won't be coming back.
Yeah, inflation is going up. It was 4.2% in April but keep in mind that it was 3.2% back in 2011. But the Fed has abandoned price stability and its time for Congress to kick them in the ass.
We haven't been in control of our destiny in a long long time.
We never have been, the game has always been rigged. Doesn't matter if its 2021 or 1921. Some people understand this better than others,
Quote: @StickyBun said:
@ AGRforever said:
@ StickyBun said:
@ AGRforever said:
I'm sure you'll find plenty of Trumpers to shit on the economy but lets be honest. Its going good because we're coming out of the pandemic. Most economic forecasts I saw had us between 4-6.5% GDP growth. We could go without a president and have a good economy with that much growth.
Had Trump been reelected he would have negatively affected the vaccine rollout but he was 100% in on the stimulus so I think that would have happened with or without him.
If I have concerns with the economy its that we have significant inflation right now. If the Fed doesn't work to cool some of that inflation with a rise in interest rates we'll be setting ourselves up for one hell of a recession. At some point $10 2x4s become an issue. If ti wasn't for massive gains in housing we wouldn't be seeing houses continuing to be built at 200-300%$ over runs vs where they were pre-pandemic.
You also wont get the unemployment rate to come down until we cut off bonus unemployment. There are democrats screeching for ANOTHER round of bonus unemployment.
The unemployment rate has been going down since August of last year.....should be close to 6.0 or under when the statistics come out for May later this month. The stimulus money will dry up soon and you'll see it get closer to 5.0 or under. But don't expect it to get back to 3.5 or thereabouts as some businesses died during COVID and won't be coming back.
Yeah, inflation is going up. It was 4.2% in April but keep in mind that it was 3.2% back in 2011. But the Fed has abandoned price stability and its time for Congress to kick them in the ass.
We haven't been in control of our destiny in a long long time.
We never have been, the game has always been rigged. Doesn't matter if its 2021 or 1921. Some people understand this better than others,
Who doesn't understand that the game is rigged? Big difference between not understanding and not being willing to accept the status quo without bitching about it.
I laugh that anybody thinks that their party isn't as equally entrenched in preserving the status quo and that in some way their party is looking out for their best interest or even the best interest of the country or the planet.
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