Re: Wow
Well, they were given a significant shit sandwich when they walked into the Whitehouse.
The economy is running so hot that we've been at effective full employment for a year. A lot of businesses are still closing early, not because of COVID, but because they can't hire enough people to stay open longer. You would think having everyone working would make people happy, but the stock market wants cheap labor which means there needs to be significant layoffs. That of course will kill consumer confidence that is already shaky due to inflation.
The ideal way they would cool things off is by bumping the interest rate at the Fed. The idea there is they can control what type of inflation we have. But instead oil/gas are out of control and the government has little it can to about that, other than threatening them with profiteering during a crisis.
Honestly, I'm not sure the Chinese tariffs would affect the supply/demand curve too much at this point. There is just too wide of a gap.
They have also discussed removing the fuel taxes for a while, but there is no trust in the petroleum industry to not take that as even more profit. And with transportation costs being such a large part of the current inflation, you have to get fuel prices under control to accomplish anything. The rest of the world would scream, and I doubt they'd even consider it, but a sure way to drop domestic fuel prices would be to have an export tariff on oil and gas. Dropping the cost of diesel would show up in just about everything you buy.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
