The notion that mortgage rates and home prices would rapidly go down if Trump got back in power, was one of the mainstay memes on the Right before the election. And examples were often cited in battleground states of how voters- once Dems - were prepared to upset the applecart and vote Trump because of high mortgage rates, e.g.
Wisconsin Voters Would Change To Trump Because Of Housing Costs? A Colossally Dumb Move
But it turns out these voters were all living in fairy land, as one learned on reading the piece on home borrowers in last Friday's Wall Street Journal (p. 2A). As noted in the article, which perhaps ought to have had more prominence before the Nov. 5th election:
"Mortage rates aren't determined by the Fed. They are heavily influenced by Treasury yields, which go up and down based on economic expectations. But the outlook for growth is strong which will keep yields and mortgage rates high."
As if to support that, one only had to glance at the adjacent column on the same page to read the headline: 'Investors Betting On New Boom', e.g.
We see clearly all the indices (on the right) that will drive Treasury yields higher - and mortgage rates - as the new growth agenda of Trump and cronies (like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel) get under way.
We learn further on in the main article on yields:
"Yields have risen since President-elect Donald Trump's victory. Investors think that Trump's tax cut heavy agenda would add to the deficit and increase economc growth and inflation. That would put upward pressure on Treasury yields. Trump has also promised higher tariffs which could further add to inflation."
In other words, the combination of higher Treasury yields because of Trump tax cuts, in tandem with his planned Tariffs (latest I read in the same WSJ is he plans 60% on Chinese goods, which would include building materials etc.) means new home buyers seeking mortgages are going to face an awful lot of financial pressure and pain.
Maybe, just maybe, they should have stuck with the 'devil' they knew instead of jumping to an orange one they didn't. A grifter and con man who promised them relief but in the end only looks out for himself. Into expanding his power, no one else's.
See Also:
Brane Space: Donald Trump & GOP "Better For Economy" ? This Delusion Is Belied By The Facts
And:
And:
by Paul Rosenberg | November 10, 2024 - 7:01am | permalink
Nine days before Election Day, Donald Trump delivered his closing argument at a Madison Square Garden rally that drew comparisons to a 1939 pro-Nazi rally in the same arena and characterized by similar anti-democratic themes: demonization of immigrants and political enemies, invocation of strongman leadership, threats of violent retribution, denunciations of the press.
Responding to criticism of this self-evident hate-fest, Trump characterized it as “a lovefest.” He wasn’t just lying. That’s too simple an explanation of how Trump behaves in general, and what he’s doing here. Lying is deceiving people about the state of the world, and Trump routinely does that too. But simply tallying up the lies gives no insight into their purpose. Bulls***ting is deceiving people about one’s motives — using true or false claims indiscriminately — and is a more accurate description of his routine behavior. But calling that rally calls a “lovefest,” is doing something more: That's gaslighting, an effort to undermine people’s entire sense of reality and impose an invented reality in its place. For example:
The great Trump economy
This outrageous fiction builds on decades of GOP puffery and media complicity. Republicans have long been trusted more on the economy, despite generations of evidence that the economy does better under Democrats. Job growth offers a particularly striking example: Nearly all of it since 1989 has occurred with Democrats in office. But Trump takes this gaslighting to new levels, and the media’s abysmal treatment of Joe Biden’s remarkable record offered him a big assist.
In the closing days of this year's campaign 23 Nobel economists issued a letter calling Kamala Harris’ agenda “vastly superior to the counterproductive economic agenda of Donald Trump.” But that assessment (echoing an earlier letter when Biden was the candidate) caused barely a ripple, compared to the widespread media echoing of Trump’s ludicrous claims that Democratic governance would bring on economic disaster.
Trump’s an old hand at gaslighting where money is concerned. The Trump University fraud was a classic example, as are his seemingly endless string of business failures: a startup pro football league, an airline, his Atlantic City casinos. But he's highly skilled at was exploiting weaknesses in the press, creating his own reality and getting just enough people to project it to the public at large. That reached a peak with "The Apprentice," the reality show whose producers built a set of fake Trump offices, because the real ones were far too shabby.
Coming into office in 2017, Trump inherited the longest economic recovery in U.S. history. “Yeah, it was pretty good because it was my economy!” as Barack Obama recently quipped. Trump left office as the first president since Herbert Hoover to lose jobs rather than gain them. Despite his repeated claims about having the “best economy” ever, economic growth was sluggish even before COVID hit. What Trump did was to brag constantly, and the media ate it up, producing the illusion of much better performance than actually occurred.
Biden, like Obama and Bill Clinton before him, was faced with the challenge of rescuing an economy that his Republican predecessor had left in shambles. Given the constraints, he was wildly successful. Under Biden, U.S. GDP has grown twice as fast as Canada's, the next nearest G7 nation. Inflation was a problem — a worldwide problem, overwhelmingly caused by supply-chain issues.
Here again the media collaborated, consistently painted a gloomy picture for Biden. University of Wisconsin political scientist Mark Copelovitch, who tracks media coverage alongside real-world economic trends, reports more than 10,000 media mentions of "inflation" since Biden took office, compared to 1,226 of "recovery." Even though inflation is now down to normal levels, there have still been 1,017 mentions of it since Aug. 1, compared to just 16 for "recovery."
“Even in 2024, continuing into the general election season, media coverage of the U.S. economy has overwhelmingly and disproportionately focused on covering inflation and the (nonexistent) recession,” Copelovitch told me, “while barely mentioning the fact that unemployment remains incredibly low or the fact that we've experienced an unprecedentedly rapid and complete economic recovery from the pandemic during Joe Biden's presidency."
Is it any wonder that even after Harris made early gains as the Democratic nominee, Trump still retained an advantage on the economy? In this case, he benefited from decades of skewed pro-Republican economic reporting. But the press largely echoed his other gaslighting claims as well. With the media’s assistance, Trump’s bottom-line gaslighting claim — that Democrats are the real threat to American democracy, and he's its savior — seemed far too credible to far too many voters.
There are certainly many other factors to consider in unpacking what happened in the 2024 election, including that it was just one element in a global trend of incumbent losses. But gaslighting is a central factor in the operation of fascism, and the failure of media in liberal democracies even to recognize its existence, much less to fight it, puts the very survival of liberal democracy at risk.
No comments:
Post a Comment