Tag: jun 7 2022

Last week in an interview with Wolf (Puppy Dog) Bllitzer on the Cartoon News Network (CNN), former Fed Head and current U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told Blitzer, “I think I was wrong then about the path that inflation would take,” after he played clips of her saying back in 2021 that inflation posed a...

Avian flu, which already has killed 40 million turkeys in the U.S., has thinned flocks that Hormel Foods relies on for its Jennie-O turkey products. As a result, Jennie-O sales will fall as much as 30 percent in the second half of this year, the company said, because it will be unable to get enough...

Retailers laid off workers in May as hotels, restaurants, and other seasonal services staffed up for the summer months. In addition to newly penny-pinching consumers, many retailers have too much inventory on hand. Stores placed orders in past months to meet consumer demand but were unable to get enough stock because of materials shortages at...

The Social Security Trust Fund will be depleted in 2035 at current rates of deposits and spending, the trustees said in their annual report released 2 June. The trust fund gained an extra year of solvency because of strong wage growth during the post-COVID recovery, which put more payroll taxes into the fund, the report...

The U.S. Federal Reserve is all but certain to raise its key interest rate by a half-point this month and again in July, but it may need to continue that pace further into the year to bring inflation under some kind of control, Fed vice-chair Lael Brainard said in a 2 June CNBC interview. “If...

A U.S. economy that has grown steadily and reliably has given way to an era in which soaring equity markets, a labor shortage, and strong consumer spending are ending as artificially low interest rates rise and trillions of dollars pumped into the system by Washington to fight the COVID War, dries up. The facts are...

Since March 2020, Americans have saved $2.5 trillion more than they normally would have, thanks to government stimulus payments, rising wages, and the COVID-related shutdown of stores and entertainment venues, Yahoo! News reported. Now that the COVID War has largely ended and consumers can spend again, some of that $2.5 trillion has begun to flow...

As we detail above, across the socio-economic and geo-political spectrum, these are “Happy Days are NOT Here Again”  U.S. consumer confidence dropped in May to its lowest point since February 2021, according to the Conference Board’s monthly survey. The survey rated confidence in April at 108.6 but found it had slipped in May to 106.4....

U.S. “zombie firms”—those whose earnings are unable to cover interest payments on their debts—now comprise 620 of America’s 3,000 largest firms, more than one in five, and collectively owe about $900 billion, Bloomberg reported. The roster includes meme stocks such as AMC Entertainment Holdings as well as familiar names such as American Airlines. ExxonMobil was...