Where’s The Beef?

Forget all the business-cycle based fancy stuff. The so-called incoming data has been bludgeoned and twisted beyond recognition during the last three years. The culprits include:

• The 2020-2021 spree of Lockdowns, Mandates & Stimmies;

• The Climate Howlers’ relentless war on prosperity-fostering fossil fuels, including Wall Street’s ESG scam;

• Rampant central bank money-printing and monetization of more than $5 trillion of the public debt just since late 2019;

• Washington’s endless Forever Wars and global-economy crippling Sanctions against Russia and dozens of other countries ixnayed by the neocons; and

• An explosion of government spending, transfer payments and borrowing like never before in peacetime history, such that there is now $50 trillion of public debt baked into the cake and multi-trillion annual debt service tabs as far as the eye can see.

So the best you can say is that most things which have been artificially juiced by Washington’s innumerable follies have been going up, while honest measures of pure private sector activity have been going sideways or down.

Here is one more powerful example of the latter. According to the purchasing managers reports, orders for manufactured goods dropped for the sixth straight month in February.

And that followed the Commerce Department’s own measure of core civilian capital equipment orders for January, which was down an inflation-adjusted -3.4% from its recent high in November 2021; and more importantly, lower by nearly -16% from its post-crisis peak way back in early 2012.

Indeed, the chart below is a smoking gun if there ever was one. The whole purpose of the Fed’s massive and prolonged interest rate repression after the Great Recession was to induce a far high level of business investment than would have otherwise occurred on the free market.

But when you look at the chart below you are put in mind of the 80-year old granny in the 1984 Wendy’s commercial. When presented with a a super-sized bun and very little content therein she famously croaked,

“Where’s the beef?”