At the beginning of August last year, Kamala Harris praised a jobs report as being an example of “Bidenomics” at work. The term was co-opted by the Biden administration as a means of countering what Republicans were saying about the weak economy. Every good bit of news that came out, they took credit for.
“Bidenomics is working,” she said at the time, letting the Biden-Harris administration take credit for the economy that month.
That was a year ago. A lot has changed, particularly the election landscape for the presidency. 2024 has shifted from a rematch of 2020 to Donald Trump now running directly against Harris. But the Biden team made a deliberate choice to call the administration the “Biden-Harris Administration,” and to tie her closely to the policies Biden and his team were putting in place.
On Friday, the jobs report for July was abysmal to the point that the markets went into a full-blown panic.
Nonfarm payrolls grew by just 114,000 for the month, down from the downwardly revised 179,000 in June and below the Dow Jones estimate for 185,000. The unemployment rate edged higher to 4.3%, its highest since October 2021.
Average hourly earnings, a closely watched inflation barometer, increased 0.2% for the month and 3.6% from a year ago. Both figures were below respective forecasts for 0.3% and 3.7%.
Stock market futures added to losses following the report while Treasury yields plunged.
And now, as the markets begin to open, things aren’t looking much better.
U.S. stock futures sharply fell on Monday as part of a global market sell-off centered around U.S. recession fears. Japan’s Nikkei 225 plunged 12% in its worst day since the 1987 Black Monday crash for Wall Street.
Here’s where U.S. stock market futures stand at the moment:
If the Dow was to follow through on that decline, it would be the first 1,000 point decline since September 2022.
There are now global fears of a U.S. recession. Given the numbers, there is real concern that the U.S. is, at best, in a pre-recession state.
The Federal Reserve has raised interest rates in a constant effort to combat inflation. Typically, when you start raising interest rates at that pace, it leads to a recession. I say “typically” because it hasn’t happened yet, and many economists assumed the Fed had pulled off the soft landing. However, the sudden contraction in the jobs market has brought those worries back to the fore, and people are panicking.
If the Biden-Harris administration was taking credit for the economy a year ago, then it should be made to take credit for it now. In truth, Biden’s policies did create the sharp rise in inflation that we as consumers are still dealing with. In truth, that rise in inflation led the Fed to start hiking rates, which forced the economy to begin to contract. In truth, this has led us to where we are today.
The timing could not be worse for Kamala Harris, whose name is one half of the “Biden-Harris” administration. It was her voice that credited “Bidenomics” with the state of the economy. She is tied to all of these policies, and if the economy does go into a full-blown recession, then it will fall on her.
If Republicans want to win in November, they should be running the clip at the beginning of this post every day, following by the July jobs report. It should be in ads everywhere as soon as they can get them on the air. But the Republican Party has been slow to define Harris and slow to properly tie her to the policies of her boss, President Joe Biden. If they want to win, they should probably get on this… like, yesterday.
