Lisa... not sure if you saw the latest..
An economy badly battered by the coronavirus shrank at a record 32.9% annual pace in the second quarter, underscoring just how big a hole the U.S. finds itself in as it labors to recover from the deepest recession in American history.
Source:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/economy-suffers-titanic-329-plunge-in-2nd-quarter-gdp-shows-and-points-to-drawn-out-recovery-2020-07-30
The data on unemployment numbers is flawed: I'll use my home state as an Example:
Let’s start with the basics. The unemployment rate in Florida jumped from 13.8 percent in April to 14.5 percent in May. That wouldn’t be surprising given our current circumstances, except that the national rate fell from month to month. Why did Florida’s rate rise? A massive number of people — 237,000 — came back to the workforce after temporarily dropping out — meaning they weren’t working or looking for work. Some of them found jobs, or returned to their previous ones. Others didn’t.
The result: More people were employed in May, but a higher percentage of the returning workers were still looking for work, which caused the unemployment rate to rise. In some ways that’s not so bad. An expanding labor force signals that people feel confident they can find work. Here’s where the numbers get shaky.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics conceded that in recent months it misclassified people as “employed, but absent from work,” instead of “unemployed, on temporary furlough,” a hiccup that stems from how the crisis quickly altered the job status of millions of workers nationwide. Without the miscalculation, the official unemployed rate would be higher.
Plus, about 800,000 people in Florida are still missing from the workforce compared to February. There’s no way they all decided to retire. Most of them likely want to work, but they aren’t looking for a job, so they aren’t officially counted among the unemployed.
I'm not blaming Trump for this. I lived through the 2008 recession and housing crash. Which technically goes back to 1977....
The evidence is overwhelming that Clinton was the architect of the financial disaster that wiped out trillions of dollars in household wealth. Under his National Homeownership Strategy, Clinton took more than 100 executive actions to pry bank lending windows wide open. Through executive order, he marshaled 10 federal agencies under a little-known task force to enforce new "flexible" mortgage underwriting guidelines to boost low-income and minority homeownership.
For the first time, banks were ordered to qualify low-income borrowers with spotty credit. The 1994 policy planted the seeds of the mortgage crisis, as lenders eventually abandoned prudent underwriting altogether. The next year, Clinton set quotas for lending in high-risk neighborhoods under an overhauled Community Reinvestment Act, while adding several hundred bank examiners to enforce the tougher CRA rules. Banks that came up short had expansion plans put on hold — a slow death sentence in an era of bank mergers and acquisitions.
For the first time, CRA ratings were made public, egging on ACORN and other radical inner-city groups, which used the reports to extort banks for $6 trillion in subprime loan set-asides by 2008.
When bankers resisted being saddled with so many risky loans, Clinton tapped Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to take them off their books, while freeing bankers to originate more of the political loans. He had the Department of Housing and Urban Development nearly double Fannie's and Freddie's quotas for underwriting "affordable" loans, which remained in force throughout the 2000s.
When the mortgage giants pushed back, complaining that it would be hard to meet the higher targets, Clinton pushed them to load up on subprime loans, while authorizing Fannie and Freddie for the first time to buy subprime securities to earn credits toward the HUD goals. The mortgage giants complied to their great detriment.
And so it goes.... and this is why I'm not on either one of the parties band wagons... but for the time being, Trump is the better of the two evils.
www.foxnews.com
babylonbee.com
