economics

Prurient Pundits

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The post-midterm, off-year elections happened this week, and every professional opinion-haver is trying to turn the results of extremely local races into their 2024 election predictions. What else are they gonna do? Report on a well-researched subject with new information? Let an expert talk instead? Of course not.

I’m going to try to avoid any 2024 election content for as long as possible. Barring any actuarial realities catching up to the frontrunners, the primaries are a sideshow with a foregone conclusion.

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Silicon Valley Bailout Package Contents

This entry was posted in comics and tagged bailout capitalism economics FDIC Larry Summers vulture capital on by
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To celebrate the 3rd anniversary of COVID, and the Iraq War’s 20th, we’re being treated to a celebration of the 2008 economic collapse’s 15th with the government’s response to Silicon Valley Bank’s failure.

FDIC normally only insures deposits up to $250,000, but since SVB was the preferred bank of the economy’s whiniest libertarians, they’re getting a full bailout. Even the ones so opposed to diversity, they refused to diversify their accounts.

Printing money out of thin air is considered a laughable and juvenile response to the debt ceiling, yet it was done throughout the the post-2008 recovery by minting money to keep banks afloat and saying the magic/obfuscating words, “quantitative easing.”

The regulations that could’ve prevented this current wave of bank failures were rolled back during the Trump administration, but not without the help of many greedy/shortsighted Democrats.

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Big Business Brain, CEO

This entry was posted in comics and tagged capitalism corporations economics jobs labor layoffs vulture capital on by
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Hedge fund managers REALLY want a recession. They particularly want high unemployment to reduce the pressure of raising wages which cuts into their primary function of pumping out dividends and stock buybacks to rich assholes.

I hated drawing this brain. My sympathies to anyone who had to draw Krang for any length of time for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

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The Fed Can Fix It!

This entry was posted in comics and tagged economics Federal Reserve inflation Jerome Powell recession unemployment on by
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Jerome Powell is the Federal Reserve Chair and was originally appointed by Trump. Biden reappointed him to make the same capital-driven decisions no elected politician could be caught making directly.

This one (Republican, by the way) unelected dude is basically the figurehead of the “free” market, but with immense power over the global economy. Unfortunately, all these people are freaking out that wages are going up for the first time in a generation, and have decided we all need to be taught a lesson while dividends and stock buybacks continue at unprecedented levels.

A functional economy would have windfall profits taxes and be clawing away at the immense gains of the 1% to cool the economy without causing millions to become unemployed. Instead we get massive recessions every 0-5 years.

I am compelled to draw obscure government functionaries no one knows, but this time I labelled him because even I couldn’t pick him out of a lineup.

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Economics Kinks

This entry was posted in comics and tagged austerity economics immigration Mitch McConnell Stephen Miller student debt Title 42 on by
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More fiduciary fun this week. Funds for COVID mitigation measures are being held up in the Senate by Republicans and the usual Democratic suspects to keep Title 42. It was written by Stephen Miller using COVID as a pretext to unilaterally deport anyone seeking asylum from a country where COVID’s run rampant with nary a mitigation measure, like the United States right now, for one example.

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Pricing Panic!

This entry was posted in comics and tagged austerity child care debt economics economy fossil fuel housing inflation medical debt student debt on by
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Russia invaded Ukraine while I was drawing this. Not good! I’ll do a cartoon about it if I think of anything more insightful than that.

I don’t usually watch local news, but we have another winter storm coming, and was curious what the snow totals would be. There were lots of segments about gas prices, even before today’s invasion. I’m sure price fluctuations are a huge inconvenience to commuters, especially the ones who bought monster truck pedestrian smashers when prices were low.

But other fixed costs have been rising for decades and can’t be ameliorated by downsizing your home and family. If there were signs on the sides of every road illuminating this, maybe they’d get as much attention as car juice.

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The Extended Groundhog Forecast

This entry was posted in comics and tagged climate climate change Covid-19 economics eviction gerrymandering labor pandemic unions voter suppression on by
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We’re about to get a nor’easter this weekend, so I’m not optimistic about what the groundhog’s gonna say next week. In fact, I’m not optimistic about anything, except that I’ll get to go snowshoeing this weekend.

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Mint the NFTs

This entry was posted in comics and tagged debt debt ceiling economics Janet Yellen Treasury Department on by
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Things are playing out exactly as they did in 2009 during the Obama years with deficits and debt suddenly the hostage du jour for Republicans (and defacto ones like Manchin and Sinema) who want things to be bad for the midterm elections.

Economists (the only social scientists who get rewarded for being wrong) poo-poo printing more money by invoking the “inflation” boogey man, but nobody has any money. The meager stimulus some people got because of the pandemic ran out months ago, and I’ve yet to see anything beyond the runaway housing/healthcare/education inflation we’ve been suffering through for the last 40 years.

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