Defeating The Bully Mentality

 Popular Economics Weekly

"But nobody expects to see a lot of prominent Republicans declaring that rejecting Medicaid expansion is wrong, that caring for Americans in need is more important than scoring political points against the Obama administration. As I said, there's an extraordinary ugliness of spirit abroad in today's America, which health reform has brought out into the open." P Krugman

sfgate.com

We are now seeing what happens when the Republican Party has adopted what I have called a bully mentality, a state of mind so fixed on domination rather than negotiation that it has inflicted massive damage to the U.S. economy and the American people with its hatred of a government that serves all Americans.

Donald Trump is the latest result of Republicans’ attempts to capture as much wealth as possible. They have dumbed down their party to such an extent that they now have a government dominated by the least educated and less talented that threatens to cause another recession.

And what can we do about it?

I quoted Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman on Republicans’ “ugly” behavior as long

ago as 2014 when Republicans opposed Obamacare. Such an ugly state of mind has never prevailed in this democracy that was founded by vanquishing the biggest bully at the time, King George III.

"...while supposed Obamacare horror stories keep on turning out to be false, it's already quite easy to find examples of people who died because their states refused to expand Medicaid. According to one recent study, the death toll from Medicaid rejection is likely to run between 7,000 and 17,000 Americans each year.”

The Republican Party since President Nixon’s resignation has been a record of economic failures. The 27 Republican-dominated red states are the poorest states, with the greatest income inequality, lowest life spans and highest birthrate mortalities. They require the most assistance from wealthy blue states to balance their budget deficits. And they have the highest death rates, including suicides, from drug and gun use.

It is the reason we are experiencing a second Gilded Age, almost a repeat of the turn of the 20th century that created the robber barons. The enormous wealth generated by the digital age has created an economy dominated by the ultra-wealthy with a massive tax burden born by all Americans.

$trillions have been siphoned away from wage earners to the owners of capital since 1980, which most economists consider the start of the second Gilded Age. The result was a series of recessions leading to the housing bubble and Great Recession during GW Bush’s reign.

And did they learn from it?

No, Republicans then elected another bully to two terms who continues to wreak havoc on the American economy with illegal tariffs and an another unending war. Donald Trump is a convicted felon who has always been a bully preying on the weakest. His many bankruptcies (5) and lawsuits (+3500) attest to his methods of defrauding investors and stiffing his workers that he could not dominate.

But perhaps the saddest example of Republicans’ transformation to a party  is that they no longer protect the environment as they did when President Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency in 1972 by signing the Clear Air and Water Acts.

When will Americans finally wake up to the suffering inflicted from such ugly behavior in a party that only caters to the richest and persecutes the poorest in upcoming elections, before inflation becomes uncontrollable, the air unbreathable, and the Iran becomes another unending war like Iraq?

Will it take another Great Recession and loss of millions of jobs before Americans stand up to such a bully mentality once again to end this Gilded Age?

Harlan Green © 2026

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

“The economy hasn’t lost its mojo.” MarketWatch

 Financial FAQs

“Advance estimates of U.S. retail and food services sales for June 2026, adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes, were $768.6 billion, up 0.2 percent (±0.4 percent)* from the previous month, and up 6.7 percent (±0.5 percent) from June 2025.” Census.gov

FREDretailsales

Headlines, such as that consumers “haven’t lost their mojo” have popped up when retail sales rose 0.2 percent in June. It’s a sign of consumers are willing to ‘shop until they drop’, which may keep the U.S. economy growing for some time.

It also means that same level of irrational exuberance of the 1990s is back once again, with the major market indexes at record levels, and consumers seemingly oblivious to the conditions that prevailed during the late 1990s.

 Nobel Laureate Robert Shiller first presented the term irrational exuberance to Alan Greenspan’s Federal Reserve Governors in 1996 to evidence how overvalued stock market levels had become at the time. But it wasn’t until 2000 that the dot-com asset bubble burst that many market commentators and some economists are comparing to the current record market rally.

The MarketWatch headline portrays most of the media’s reaction to the latest Advance Retail and Food sales report by the U.S. Census Bureau. The slightly hysterical headline is really a sign of relief because of the slight drop in monthly gas prices that prevailed during the 60-day cease fire agreement.

But the cease fire has ended. And it reveals how badly the Trump tariffs and Iran war have hurt consumer spending, still the backbone of U.S. economic growth. We have been a consumer-driven economy since the 1950s and end of World War II.

And since retail sales are not inflation adjusted, when adjusted for inflation, gas and food in particular have become less affordable. Retail inflation is still above 3 percent. Retail sales have fluctuated wildly, as per the above graph, rising 6.7 percent in 12 months because consumer bought more in earlier months to get ahead of the rising inflation—i.e., before the Iran War began to jack up everyday prices.

Though sales at car dealers and online merchants both jumped about 2 percent in June, sales fell at grocery, clothing and healthcare stores, says MarketWatch.

So, consumers are still shopping because they must, putting them further in debt. The Consumer Price Index for basic necessities like gas and food is still above 3 percent, as I said, and the wholesale (PPI) price index for raw materials that go into retail goods is 5.5 percent annually, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported. It’s still the largest rise in more than three years.

We don’t have to look at just the dot-com bubble to compare, either. I see an unsettling resemblance to the ‘roaring twenties’ of an earlier era from the recovery of another pandemic, the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1919 to 1920 that killed what would be millions of Americans if at our current population level.

It was a long recovery—until 1929 and the Black Friday stock market crash that led to the Great Depression, caused in part by another era of high tariffs that led to product shortages.

How long may this era of irrational exuberance last that has driven the financial markets to record levels with so much wealth pouring into a new space age that will take us years to return to the moon, much less turn a profit?

We are at another turning point in what currently looks like an A.I. revolution, much like the Internet’s introduction that took decades to adopt, and recovered from a Great Recession, let’s not forget.

So the best way to survive another bout of irrational exuberance is to be patient, in my opinion, rather than listen to the crowd that promises the next big thing.

Harlan Green © 2026

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Slower Economic Growth Ahead?

Popular Economics Weekly

Second-Quarter GDP Growth Estimate Increased
“On July 7, the GDPNow model estimate for real GDP growth in the second quarter of 2026 is 1.4 percent, up from 1.2 percent on July 1.”

AtlantaFed

What is happening to U.S. economic growth in 2026? The Atlanta Federal Reserve is one of the few organizations brave enough to attempt to predict future growth in constantly updated forecasts. And the news is not good for most Americans.

The culprit for the volatility in GDP second quarter economic growth predictions by the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow estimate that had dipped as low as 1.2 percent and is still a mere 1.4 percent (in the above GDP graph), is the large increase in our trade deficit.

And this was the gap that President Trump wanted to shrink with his new tariffs. It has worsened largely because Trump and his advisors don’t know what they are doing; i.e., haven’t taken the time to make the tariffs legal by negotiating with trade partners after doing the required research and then getting congressional approvals, rather than via his illegal executive orders.

The GDPNow model was predicting 3-4 percent Q2 GDP growth until last June as per the graph. But the trade gap has suddenly jumped 42.2% to $77.6 billion, the highest level since March 2025, said the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis and Census Bureau.

The most hurt is being done to American workers, since the enlarged trade deficit mirrors the production that had shifted overseas. So many of the components that go into the surging AI build-out are now being imported--especially computers and computer chips—which means an increasing share of the buildout is benefiting foreign workers.

This is a main reason for the alarming drop in June job numbers to a mere 57,000 workers, most of them in healthcare. Some 755,000 workers dropped out of the labor force in June because “jobs are hard to get,” said the Conference Board’s latest consumer Confidence Survey.

What's more, job gains in May and April were revised down to a combined 277,000 from a previous 351,000 - 74,000 fewer than previously reported.

Trump’s Iran War disaster is another reason for the hiring slowdown because higher energy prices from the Middle East is elevating inflation. Wall Street is hoping the A.I. revolution will boost labor productivity to such an extent that it will tame inflation, but without creating many new jobs.

The trade gap jumped 42.2% to $77.6 billion, the highest level since March 2025.

The major culprit; capital goods imports soared $1.1 billion to a record high $128.0 billion that subtract from GDP growth, which calculates just what is produced domestically.

We could be producing more of those imports domestically. But that hasn’t happened so exports dropped 3.2% to $317.7 billion in the latest report.

The shrinking labor force will also shrink GDP growth since fewer workers plus higher inflation means less will be produced domestically because of the higher costs, unless A.I. delivers on its promises of higher productivity. And that will take years, experts have been saying.

All this means fewer Americans will benefit for some time. The International Monetary fund predicts prices won’t come back down until the end of 2027, and only if the Iran war ends.

The official scorecard of the U.S. economy was updated to show the economy grew at a 2.1% annual pace in the first three months of the year, faster than the previously reported 1.6%.

Is that good news? Maybe, but Q1 consumer spending was the weakest in four years.

There will be more robots, Claude, ChatGPT, Open AI, etc., etc. but a shrinking workforce pays less taxes to support public policies, social security, Medicare. And don’t forget the public debt, which is soaring.

Harlan Green © 2026

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

No More Jobs?

 Popular Economics Weekly

“Consumer confidence inched up in June as falling oil prices in recent weeks provided some relief to consumer inflation fears,” said Dana M Peterson, Chief Economist, The Conference Board. “Consumer appraisals of current business conditions were slightly more positive compared to last month. However, perceptions of the current labor market softened measurably as the percentage of consumers saying jobs were ‘hard to get’ rose to 22.5%, the highest level since January 2021 (22.8%). Conference Board

 

MarketWatch

The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Survey highlighted what was behind the meager total of 57,000 new jobs in June – the fewest in four months. The job market may not recover from the damage the Trump administration has done to the U.S. economy anytime soon.

Some 755,000 worker dropped out of the labor force in June because “jobs are hard to get,” said the Conference Board’s survey.

What's more, job gains in May and April were revised down to a combined 277,000 from a previous 351,000 - 74,000 fewer than previously reported.

Trump’s Iran War disaster is probably the main reason for the job losses because higher energy prices from the Middle East are elevating inflation and slowing down hiring for years to come. Wall Street is hoping the A.I. revolution will boost labor productivity to such an extent that it will tame inflation, but without creating many new jobs.

The other culprit for fewer new jobs? Federal immigration officials have detained more than 10,000 people in the last five days, reports the NYTimes, a major surge that has stemmed from a push within Immigration and Customs Enforcement to increase arrest rates. Immigrants won in the latest SCOTUS rulings that ICE cannot hold them without due process, which might slow down the roundups because it means a bond hearing.

The shrinking labor force will shrink economic growth as well since fewer workers means less will be produced; unless the A.I. delivers on it promises of higher producivity. And that will take years. But that means fewer workers, anyway. There will be more robots, Claude, ChatGPT, Open AI, etc., etc. and a shrinking workforce that pays less taxes to support public policies, social security, Medicare and public debt don’t forget, which is soaring, of course.

Well, many of the new jobs will be in the lower paying healthcare industry — hospitals, doctor's offices, dentists, nursing homes and so forth — that created 47,000 of the 57,000 new U.S. jobs in June.

The big question will be how to support our public policies that serve all Americans in the future (and preserve jobs), rather than more Republican policies that continue to favor the concentration of wealth via A.I. or whatever, driving U.S. ever closer to insolvency.

Harlan Green © 2026

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

No Relief From Inflation

 Popular Economics Weekly

 “From the same month one year ago, the PCE price index for May increased 4.1 percent. Excluding food and energy, the PCE price index increased 3.4 percent from one year ago.”

 

BEA.gov

The Personal Consumption Expenditure Index (PCE), the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge that covers the widest spectrum of price changes, showed no relief in May. In fact, the PCE graph above showed inflation’s steady climb since Trump’s April 2025 Liberation Day (illegal) tariff hikes levied on the rest of the world that must now be repaid.

Refunding the tariffs to importers won’t reduce inflation because the higher import costs were passed on to consumers and producers. It becomes a chain reaction as those costs work through the economy. There are also the distributors, for instance, as well as the retailers and manufacturers’ profits that go into the chain.

The 4.1% annual inflation rate means inflation is now out of control for wholesale prices that go into the finished products as well. This is while Kevin Warsh, the new Fed Chairman, has said he is committed to bringing inflation back down to 2%.

When and how can it be done? We will be living with the likelihood the Fed may have to raise interest rates sometime this year. The Ukraine and Iran wars are creating more product shortages on top of the supply chain shortages caused by the tariffs.

The Ukraine war could be over if Trump had taken Ukraine’s side in the conflict instead of Putin’s. And how will he handle the Iranians who have the U.S. over a barrel (of more than oil) because he must bring down the price of oil-based products as well?

The U.S. economy is growing at 2% in the latest first quarter revision because consumers have kept shopping, but with a terrific toll on their personal savings rate (down to just 3%).

The financial markets have added to the frenzy because of the A.I. spending to expand data centers. There’s more than a little irrational exuberance prevailing, I said last week.

Their actions have raised consumer prices to such a level that they may not come down for years. We know this because the wholesale Producer Price Index (PPI), that measures the price of raw materials going into the finished products rose a whopping 1.1% in May, seasonally adjusted, also the largest rise in more than three years that must work its way through the product chain.

No, inflation is here to stay for a while, producing an immense asset bubble as the U.S. economy advances into the next stage of our industrial revolution. Economists have another term to describe it—creative destruction—that economist John Kenneth Galbraith said was,

“the cyclical process by which the system eliminates the people and institutions which are mentally too vulnerable for useful economic service. Unfortunately the process has larger and less benign effects, including the possibility of painful recession or depression.”

We are in this inflationary mess because of executive actions made on impulse rather than research by a President and advisors who are completely ignorant of  basic economic theory, who has said he likes the inflation and no longer cares about the economy.

Who will be the winners and losers in the A.I. economy to come at a speed that will upend the lives and jobs of the next generations?

Harlan Green © 2026

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Retail Sales Recovering?

 Popular Economics Weekly

“Advance estimates of U.S. retail and food services sales for May 2026, adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes, were $763.7 billion, up 0.9 percent (±0.4 percent) from the previous month, and up 6.9 percent (±0.5 percent) from May 2025.” Census Bureau

 

FREDretailsales

Retail sales are recovering in 2026 because consumers are still shopping, even though paying more for automobiles and gas because of the higher inflation. But it’s emptying their pocketbooks, to no one’s surprise.

So why do they keep shopping? There’s more than a little irrational exuberance prevailing at the moment in financial markets because of optimism over the SpaceX IPO that is breaking sales records. It’s called herd behavior in economic parlance, because its investors seem to believe SpaceX is the next big thing without too much forethought.

Nobel Laureate Robert Shiller calls it lazy thinking, listening to little more than word of mouth or hearsay, or scanning the headlines but not what is between the lines, instead of researching it.

SpaceX is making a tiny profit, yet Elon Musk’s hyper sales pitch has investors believe the sky’s the limit with future earnings from…what, a trip to the moon or Mars? Its IPO has capitalized it as high as established corporations such as Microsoft that have a track record of real profits.

The stock market indexes are still breaking records in part because the major corporations have record profits. And the job market is finally recovering, after almost no job growth last year. The sudden hiring surge is because manufacturing has rebounded; both from the Biden administration’s $5 trillion raised in legislation to modernize U.S. infrastructure and the $1.5-2 trillion suddenly pouring into the A.I. construction of data centers.

In fact, there’s so much irrational exuberance that this so-called A.I. revolution is now being compared to the Dotcom (in 2000) and housing bubbles (2008).

Too much fiber optic cable was laid in the years leading up to 2000 that is only now turning a profit, and too many homes were built during the bubble that weren’t being absorbed by the housing market, resulting in basically flat home sales and too little construction of new homes for a decade.

This is even though the U.S. population has increased by 60 million since 2000, according to the Census Bureau. The result is the lack of affordable housing and record homelessness, a cure of which would be more profitably invested in, rather than A.I.

But despite the market optimism, most consumers have become more cautious. Irrational exuberance hasn’t convinced ordinary consumers who can barely afford to keep up with rising prices. The Conference Board’s Index of Leading Economic Indicators that attempts to predict business cycles, shows too many headwinds for much improvement.

“Consumers are feeling squeezed because everyday costs—especially gas and energy—are rising faster than their incomes, leaving many households with less money available for things like travel, restaurants, entertainment, and shopping. The good news is that businesses are spending heavily on AI, data centers, and new technology, helping to keep the economy growing, while consumers pull back spending,” said Justyna Zabinska-La Monica, Senior Manager, Business Cycle Indicators for the Conference Board.

Growing retail sales are a positive sign that the economy is improving for consumers as well as market investors but it can’t last unless inflation declines. Will artificial intelligence be the ticket to greater prosperity for all?

Let’s hope so, otherwise the A.I. bubble will also burst.

Harlan Green © 2026

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

"I Love the Inflation."

 Financial FAQs

Huffington Post

Why would our President say, “I love the inflation.” in the Oval Office in front of the world’s press? Huffington Post reported it was after being asked if Trump was concerned about new consumer price index data that showed the annual inflation rate at a 4.2%, three-year high.

Energy prices are skyrocketing with no prospects for a resolution to the Strait of Hormuz closure. And the latest inflation news is that the Producer Price Index for final demand just rose a whopping 1.1% in May, seasonally adjusted, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported, also the largest rise in more than three years

And the PPI contains the prices of the raw materials (such as oil products) that go into the Consumer Price Index. So no relief in sight for the pocketbooks of most Americans, the 80 percent of wage-earners that statistics show are now living from paycheck-to-paycheck.

Huffington Post reports the anti-Trump group Home of the Brave said that was why it was already putting the president's remarkable quote on political billboards in 16 states, part of a $15 million advertising buy highlighting the rising cost of living.

Yet there is a booming stock market (Thank you, Elon Musk’s SpaceX IPO). This is while wages rose 3.4 percent in the latest May unemployment report, which means it can’t keep up with 4.2% Inflation.

Most Americans are depleting their savings just to survive. The latest Personal Consumption Expenditure survey shows the sharp drop in personal savings—from 6.4 percent of their disposable income in January 2024 to 2.6 percent today that consumers are drawing from to keep up their spending.

It’s because most of the job growth has been in the lower-wage service sector—such as healthcare, education, and social services. Wages began to drop below 4 percent in May 2024, at the same time as inflation began to rise when Trump announced higher tariffs on all 180 countries in the world, which his advisors had to know meant another tax on consumers.

So the real reason Trump made such a flippant remark must be because he doesn’t give a damn about inflation, is blatantly ignoring the promise he made to voters that he would bring it down from “day one” of his presidency.

Why? He needs taxpayers to help pay down the ballooning debt incurred from his Big Better Tax Bill giving his fellow oligarchs such large tax breaks that it is endangering the full faith and credit of our government.

There’s another ‘balloon’ we should also start worrying about, the $ billions being invested in upcoming IPO's such as Elon Musk’s Space X that has sucked up some $75 billion in investments with little profits to show from it, and two more high-profile IPOs to follow: Anthropic and Open AI.

It’s part of the A.I. boom that’s being touted as another Industrial Revolution. But we mustn’t forget the pain such revolutions cost. The Industrial Revolution dating from 1890 caused 15 deep recessions or depressions, such is the price of such progress.

Or, we can demand that the record number of billionaires being created, and now even Elon Musk, the first Trillionaire created from the SpaceX IPO, pay their fair share.

Harlan Green © 2026

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen