Hoarding Sweeps Across America, Sparks Food Shortages & Sharp Price Hikes As Supply Chains Collapse
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u81PkxP1Ydc
THE ECONOMY TAKING A TURN FOR THE WORSE, ENDLESS MONEY PRINTING WILL CAUSE MORE PAIN, HOME PRICES
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHv7Wc76-qo
Amid “enormous economic uncertainty,” Biden reappoints Powell as Fed chair
After considerable toing and froing within the administration, US President Joe Biden has decided to renominate Jerome Powell for another four-year term as chairman of the US Federal Reserve.
Having boosted the stock market to record highs by pouring trillions of dollars into the financial system over his term, including $4.5 trillion in response to the March 2020 financial crisis, Powell had strong support on Wall Street with gushing praise for his management of the pandemic crisis.
He also received bipartisan support for his role, including from Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen who made clear her support for Powell’s reappointment some months ago.
But there was opposition to Powell, a Republican initially appointed by Trump, from the so-called “left” of the Democratic party on the grounds he had eased bank regulations imposed in response to the 2008 crisis and was not sufficiently attuned to the issue of climate change.
Last month Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren labelled Powell a “dangerous man” to lead the Fed.
Powell was also under something of a cloud because of a scandal which emerged in September involving members of the Fed’s governing body who were found to be active investors last year as the Fed was propping up the market.
Their preferred candidate was Lael Brainard, who was regarded as stronger on regulation. On the issue of monetary policy, however, Brainard has supported all the actions taken by the Fed chair and is regarded, in words of the Financial Times (FT), as “mildly more dovish than Powell.”
In the event, Biden sought to have a bet each away, appointing Powell to the top post while elevating Brainard to the post of vice-chair, creating the “impression of continuity in monetary policy with a more robust approach to regulation” as the FT put it.
In his remarks on the decision to reappoint Powell, Biden gave a nod to the Democratic “left,” saying Powell had told him he would make accelerating the Fed’s efforts to address the risks posed to the financial system by climate change a priority.
Biden said Powell had also underscored the importance of making sure that “our financial regulations are staying ahead of emerging risks be they from innovations and cryptocurrency or the practices of less regulated nonbank financial institutions.”
Warren repeated her opposition to Powell’s renomination as did two other Democrat senators. But the appointment is expected to pass the Senate easily with broad support from both parties.
This is because of the massive expansion of the Fed’s intervention into the financial system to prop it up after the Treasury market froze in March 2020, threatening a full-scale collapse on an even greater scale than 2008.
The Fed conducted this intervention on the grounds that it was necessary to defend jobs and help prop up the labour market. But Powell’s record shows his policies are directed to sustaining the stock market where speculation, funded by cheap money provided by the Fed, has driven it to record heights.
In 2018, the Fed had started to lift interest rates in order to try to restore more “normal” monetary policy. But when Wall Street cracked the whip, Powell rapidly reversed course. After a significant market downturn in December 2018, he promised to end interest rate rises in January 2019 and then cut interest rates in the middle of the year, well before the pandemic struck.
In August last year, amid the signs of rising inflation, Powell initiated a major shift in Fed policy. It would no longer seek to keep inflation to 2 percent but allow it to rise above that level in order to maintain an average 2 percent rate over time.
According to Powell, it would not move to lift rates when the unemployment had reached low levels—the procedure adopted in the past—and this decision reflected “appreciation for the benefits of a strong labour market, particularly for many in low- and moderate-income communities.”
As the founding American Trotskyist James P. Cannon once remarked, there is always a “good reason” and then there is the real one. In this case the real reason for the policy shift was to assure Wall Street the Fed would not cut off the supply of money that has enabled the multi-billionaire Wall Street oligarchs to rake in money hand over fist during the pandemic.
As inflation started to rise, Powell, maintained it was “transitory”—another assurance to Wall Street that interest rates would not be lifted immediately.
But with inflation going above 5 percent for the past several months, reaching an annual rate of more than 6 percent in October, this claim has become impossible to maintain.
The Fed responded at its last meeting by deciding to taper its monthly purchases of $120 billion of financial assets—US Treasury bonds and mortgaged-backed securities—by $15 billion, ending them completely by next June.
In announcing the decision, Powell assured the markets this did not mean interest rates would soon be lifted.
But this course is now under fire and there is a growing chorus of criticism that the Fed is moving far too slowly in the face of rising prices.
Former US treasury secretary Lawrence Summers started the campaign warning several months ago of the danger of an inflationary spiral like that of the 1970s and has since been joined by others.
Last week the chair of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, Jason Furman, said the stance of monetary policy should move “in a less expansionary direction.”
“While the Fed has raised rates too much too soon in the past, this alternative timing may result in the opposite error,” he wrote.
The Fed is caught on the horns of a significant dilemma. On the one hand, it fears that moves to lift interest rates will set off a major crisis in financial markets which have become totally dependent on the supply of ultra-cheap money used to finance increasingly risky bets and the orgy of speculation in so-called “assets” such as cryptocurrencies.
On the other, it fears the rising tide of class struggle as workers strive, in what is taking the form of a rebellion against the suppression of the trade union bureaucracies, to win back the wages they have lost during the pandemic and in the decades that preceded it.
In a tweet on the news earlier this month that John Deere had been forced to restore cost-of-living adjustments (COLA) stolen from workers in 2015, Summers pointed to the wages as the key issue.
“Those serene about inflation should ponder the fact that the new John Deere contract has reinstated previously dropped cost-of-living allowances,” he wrote.
An editorial in the Wall Street Journal raised the same issue, saying the restoration of COLA should be “an alarm bell for the Fed” and the longer inflation remained higher the more workers would demand the same.
Speaking on his announcement that he would reappoint Powell, Biden said there was “enormous uncertainty for our economy.”
Powell responded by declaring that the Fed would “use our tools both to support the economy and a strong labour market, and to prevent higher inflation from becoming entrenched” while “vigilantly guarding the resilience and stability of the financial system.”
The problem for Powell in his second term is that these goals are inherently contradictory. The Fed is being driven to tighten monetary policy to contain the growing wages movement sparked by inflation, but at the same time, such is the extent of indebtedness in the financial system, that moves in that direction could see a collapse in asset valuations, both on the stock market and more broadly.
House Democrats pass stripped-down social welfare bill with massive tax cut for the rich
On Friday morning, the House of Representatives passed its version of President Joe Biden’s $1.75 trillion “Build Back Better” social welfare and climate bill. As expected, the measure was approved on a party-line vote, with 220 Democrats voting “Yes” and all 212 Republicans voting “No.” One Democrat, Jared Golden of Maine, a conservative former Marine who served tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, broke ranks and voted in opposition to the bill.
Golden had announced that he would oppose the bill because it included a massive tax break for the wealthy. The outcome of months of internal Democratic Party wrangling was the decision of the Biden White House and the party leadership to strip the bill of all major tax increases opposed by big business and slash the top line figure for social programs and climate protection in half, from $3.25 trillion to $1.75 trillion over 10 years.
That, however, did not satisfy the Wall Street and corporate interests that dictate government policy and control both major parties. Earlier this month, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi incorporated into the bill a measure demanded by wealthy donors in high-tax states such as New York, New Jersey and California. It was the lifting of a $10,000 cap on deductions on federal income taxes to compensate for state and local taxes. The cap was imposed as part of the Trump tax bill passed in December of 2017, which slashed taxes for corporations and the wealthy.
Until then, there was no limit on the amount of federal tax deductions for state and local taxes that wealthy people in generally pro-Democratic high-tax states could claim by itemizing their federal tax returns. In imposing the limit, Trump and the Republicans were targeting states that historically vote “blue” in federal elections.
This infuriated the Democrats’ wealthy backers, who demanded that the Biden budget bill raise the limit on so-called SALT (state and local tax) deductions. The Democrats acceded by adding to the bill a provision raising the limit to $80,000 for each of the next nine years.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that this tax windfall for the wealthy will cost the federal government $285 billion over the 10-year span covered by the bill, making it the second most costly item in the legislation. It is topped only by a combined $390 billion for universal pre-school for three- and four-year-old children and limited subsidies for child care.
It is considerably higher than the allocation for clean energy and climate resilience ($220 billion), four weeks of paid family and medical leave ($195 billion), clean energy and electricity tax credits ($190 billion), affordable housing ($170 billion), Medicaid home- and community-based services ($150 billion), a one-year extension of the expanded child tax credit ($130 billion), and tax credits for health insurance premiums under Obamacare ($125 billion).
It would help pay for programs that were severely cut or dropped outright from the bill under pressure from big business and its most open mouthpieces in the Democratic Party, such as senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. These include free community college (eliminated); the ability of Medicare to negotiate drug prices with the pharmaceutical industry, thereby lowering their costs (reduced to a shell program affecting only a handful of drugs and not even starting until 2024); and Medicare coverage for dental, hearing and vision (reduced to limited subsidies for hearing aids).
According to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center, the SALT tax provision will overwhelmingly benefit the top 10 percent of income earners, with virtually nothing going to the remaining 90 percent, i.e., the working class and lower-middle class. The measure will particularly benefit the top one percent, those who make over $867,000 a year. They will see a tax cut in the tens of thousands of dollars.
“Anything you do to eliminate the SALT cap is going to be regressive, because that tax is overwhelmingly paid by very high-income people,” said Howard Gleckman of the Tax Policy Center. “Anything you do to lower that tax doesn’t matter for most people.”
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) reported that a family of four in Washington D.C. making $1 million per year would receive 10 times as much tax relief next year from expanding the state and local tax deductions as a middle-class family would receive from an expansion of the child tax credit. The CRFB said that two-thirds of households making more than $1 million a year would get a tax cut under the legislation because of the increase in the state and local property tax deduction.
Pointing to the brazen hypocrisy of Biden and the Democratic Party, Marx Goldwein, senior policy director at the CRFB, said, “We’re debating about whether to give lower- and middle-class families a thousand dollars more a year through the child tax credit, while giving upper-class families $10,000 or more through SALT. That’s counter to everything the Democrats have been saying Build Back Better is about and everything they said about the Trump tax cuts.”
According to a report from the Tax Foundation, raising the SALT cap would more than offset other tax increases for the wealthy in 2022 included in the House bill. These include a 15 percent minimum corporate tax, a 1 percent tax on stock buybacks, increased taxes on US companies’ foreign profits, and a surtax of 5 percent on those with adjusted gross income over $10 million and 8 percent on those making more than $25 million.
In a column in the Financial Times on Thursday, Edward Luce alluded to the Democrats’ obsession with identity politics and linked it to the Build Back Better bill:
The result is a bill that caters best to the most powerful slice of Americans—the very wealthy. They can sleep easy now that the carried interest loophole, which allows private equity partners to be taxed at lower than ordinary income rates—as Warren Buffett pointed out, they pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries—is probably safe. As it stands, the bill will also give wealthy Americans a bigger tax cut than they got from Trump’s big 2017 tax bill.
Even this miserable travesty of social reform will be further gutted if not blocked outright in the Senate, where passage will require the support of all 50 Democrats. Neither Manchin nor Sinema has signed on to the bill, the former having declared his opposition to even a completely inadequate a four-week paid leave provision, while calling for means testing and work requirements for other social benefits.
The so-called “progressives”—Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren in the Senate, the more than 100-strong House Progressive Caucus—capitulated to the demand of Biden and the most right-wing factions in the Democratic caucuses to pass the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill. This bill was backed by virtually every corporate lobby group, without having secured the agreement of Manchin and Sinema to support Senate passage of the broader “Build Back Better” social spending bill, against which the corporations have waged a massive lobbying campaign.
Sanders, for his part, has denounced the inclusion of the SALT provision in the House bill but is supporting a modified version in the Senate bill, according to which eligibility for expanded tax deductions would be limited to people making less than $400,000 a year. On the other hand, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, widely known as the “senator from Wall Street,” is supporting an even bigger deduction than that provided by the House.
He has announced that he will bring up the National Defense Authorization Act, which allocates $778 billion for the military in a single year (nearly half the 10-year Build Back Better budget) and the anti-China United States Innovation and Competition Act before taking up the social/climate measure passed by the House. This could delay consideration of Build Back Better until next year, something Manchin has hinted at, likely killing the legislation.
All of the so-called “progressives” promoted by the pseudo-left, including Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman, Ilhan Omar and Cori Bush, voted for the House bill on Friday, demonstrating the DSA’s role as an arm of one of the two main parties of US imperialism.
During the 2020 Democratic primaries, every candidate pledged to repeal the Trump tax cut for the rich. Biden has repeatedly called his domestic agenda a “blue collar” program. While declaring ad nauseam that “I am a capitalist,” who has nothing against people becoming billionaires, he has called on Wall Street to “pay their fair share.”
Now it is perfectly clear what this actually means. Under conditions where the Democrats control the White House and both houses of Congress, they have dropped any attempt to raise corporate or personal income tax rates for the wealthy The only significant change Biden and the Democrats are seeking to make to Trump’s multitrillion-dollar tax giveaway to the oligarchy is to increase its scale.
This is a devastating exposure of the fraudulent claims of the DSA and similar organizations of the upper-middle class that progressive change is possible within the framework of the capitalist two-party system and that the Democratic Party can serve as an instrument of social change.
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