President Joe Biden’s team’s comedy of errors is no laughing matter
Did Jimmy Buffet inadvertently describe the current U.S. economy with his song “Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes”?
Those changes in latitudes,
Changes in attitudes, nothing remains quite the same.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen confessed under oath before Congress that she mistakenly predicted that inflation was transitory. Thinking people knew that for this inflation to “transitory” required the country to revert to the Trump energy program. Unless, and until, President Joe Biden does this, Ms. Yellen’s prediction was so egregious as to question the motives of someone who was the Obama-Biden chair of the Federal Reserve. When he was president, Donald Trump removed her from that position.
President Joe Biden
President Biden brought her back in the key policy-making position of treasury secretary, which makes her recent inability to be able to answer the question “What is the federal deficit?” illustrative of the writings of Sir Walter Scott: “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!.”
Unfortunately, this type of incompetence is a theme of President Biden’s team as Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm could not answer the question of “What are the country’s energy needs?” And Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas could not answer, “Where are the border crossers were located?”
The normally circumspect chairman and CEO of our country’s largest bank, J.P. Morgan Chase, Jaime Dimon, said, “Brace yourself for an economic hurricane caused by the Fed and the Ukraine war.”
The Federal Reserve is trying to correct the inflation caused by the president’s energy policy by raising interest rates by 0.75%, the biggest increase since 1994.
The Fed cannot increase the supply of energy so it must hurt consumers’ ability to purchase energy, decreasing the demand in order to bring down gas prices.
An additional indicator of changes came from the major companies representing diverse industries, such as Target, Microsoft and Intel. They all took the unprecedented step of lowering their forecast for their businesses that they had made only a short time ago. That news indicates something just happened to change their views! These companies know their businesses, and it is in their best interest to keep their credibility by making, and keeping, accurate forecasts.
False forecasts can lead to investigations by federal agencies, as is happening now to Twitter for its allegedly false filings about the number of Bots (accounts not maintained by humans) they were counting as followers.
On June 8, 2022, the MACD for the giant’s Amazon and Apple turned negative. The Moving Average Convergence Divergence is a “leading statistical indicator” that investors use to assist them in their analysis of the potential future price of stocks. It measures the incremental changes in the current direction and rate of change of the price. While no indicators are always right, many investors, including me, have found the MACD very helpful.
The MACD of a stock is an indication of the direction the price of a stock seems to be currently headed. For example, an increasing MACD indicates the stock price should increase and vice versa. However, the validity of all statistical tools is dependent on the assumption that all other variables remain unchanged which, of course, they never do. However, since it was not the news from Amazon and Apple that turned their MACD’s negatives on June 8. Was there other news?
On June 8 the president’s calendar stated “President Joe Biden’s day began at the crack of 11:15 a.m. for a trip to California for an interview” with Jimmy Kimmel in Hollywood. (Ever heard appearances on a late-night talk show being labeled an “interview?”) Yes, it used the words “the crack of 11:15.”
President Biden was in Los Angeles that week for the Summit of the Americas, but was the event’s very name a political exaggeration?
The president did not invite representatives from Cuba, after the Obama-Biden team reopened relations and reopened the U.S. embassy; Venezuela, who the president is trying to convince to sell us more oil, or Nicaragua, who announced it will permit Russian forces to train in their country.
President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of Mexico, despite Vice President Kamala Harris’s gifting Mexico with hundreds of millions of dollars, chose not to attend — perhaps because of President Biden’s policies that have made the drug cartels richer than the government. The heads of El Salvador, Honduras or Guatemala (despite hundreds of millions from Vice President Harris) also declined to attend the Summit of the Americas.
President Biden’s speech included changes in the latitude of the U.S. policies away from the U.S. and toward select other countries in the Americas with funding for programs to:
— Improve the governments in other countries.
— Go after drug traffickers except apparently those crossing our borders.
— Tackle the climate crisis.
Were the negative events of June 8 assisted by the leak of the president’s speech that ignored the U.S. crisis of border security, inflation and energy?
The events included Jaime Dimon’s warning; Target, Microsoft and Intel reducing their forecasts; the decline in the MACDs of Amazon and Apple; Ms. Yellen’s admitting she was wrong; the lack of knowledge of the secretaries of the energy and homeland security; President Biden’s ignoring the crisis of inflation, energy and our southern borders; putting Vice President Harris in charge of another gifting program; the Pelosi group’s fixation on the trespassers of Jan. 6 to the exclusion of all else.
The combination of all this lends credence to the Buffet lyrics:
Those changes in latitudes,
Changes in attitudes, nothing remains quite the same,
With all of our running and all of our cunning,
If we couldn’t laugh, we would all go insane
Brent E. Zepke is an attorney, arbitrator and author who lives in Santa Barbara. Formerly he taught at six universities and numerous professional conferences. He is the author of six books: “One Heart-Two Lives,” “Legal Guide to Human Resources,” “Business Statistics,” “Labor Law,” “Products and the Consumer” and “Law for Non-Lawyers.”
