The Bureau of Labor Statistics said Thursday that people are being laid off at the fastest pace since last summer. It comes after payroll and human resources firm ADP reported Wednesday that new job growth had come to a near halt. Both reports underscore the Federal Reserve's success in slowing the economy.
New state claims for unemployment insurance rose by 14,000 last week, the highest level since August 2023. Meanwhile, payrolls grew by just 122,000 in July, the slowest pace since January.
Most telling is a privately-held report from global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which found that while companies have announced 460,000 job cuts so far this year, employers plan to rehire fewer than 75,000 of those who were laid off — the lowest level since 2012, more than a decade ago.
As planned
All of this is according to plan. “The labor market is moving in line with the Federal Reserve's efforts to contain inflation,” said Nella Richardson, chief economist at ADP.
This plan to slow the economy to fight inflation is the result of the implementation of Modern Monetary Policy (MMT), a strategy first advocated by Stephanie Kelton, professor of public policy and economics at Stony Brook University and advisor to socialist big spenders Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC). Spending money without limits, without worrying about where it comes from, is every socialist's dream.
As Kelton pointed out more than five years ago:
To save the planet and right historic inequalities, we must change how we approach the federal budget — abandoning our obsession with “paying for” everything with new revenues or spending cuts.
To combat the inevitable inflation (the destruction of the purchasing power of the currency), the Federal Reserve (which created new money) raises interest rates, which has the intended effect of slowing the economy through unemployment and bankruptcies, starting again another cycle of credit creation, inflation, false economic growth, and contraction.
As the New American noted five years ago:
Simply put, MMT is a new alchemy, a repetition of the dreams of tyrants 4,000 years ago, a medieval pseudo-chemistry that sought to turn lead into gold, a philosophy that promised a cure-all for cancer and a means to indefinitely extend life on earth.
Austrian economist Murray Rothbard exposed the myth of wealth creation through monetary inflation.
It is the abundance of goods that gives us wealth, and it is the scarcity of resources like land, labor, and capital that limits that abundance.
Creating more coins does not create these resources, and although we may feel temporarily twice as wealthy, all we are doing is diluting the currency supply.
As people rush to consume their newfound wealth, prices roughly double.
Implementing MMT
The COVID-19 pandemic has presented the federal government with an opportunity to put MMT into action with a vengeance. In February 2020, just as the federal government began stepping up attacks on economic, political and religious liberty in the name of fighting the China Virus, the Federal Reserve reported a money supply of $15 trillion. As of Thursday, that figure was $21 trillion, up more than 35%.
And that is exactly what MMT has done: it has reduced the purchasing power of the American dollar by more than a third, resulting in a comparable surge in the cost of living over the same period.
So how well is MMT working? Hiring activity is declining, job openings are falling, unemployment is rising, bankruptcies are increasing, major retailers are closing hundreds of stores, credit card delinquencies are increasing, and mortgage interest rates are at record highs, negatively impacting the housing market.
But isn't the economy doing well? The current administration is touting that mantra. ZipRecruiter's chief recruiter Julia Pollack exposed the hoax: “This is an extraordinary situation, where the aggregate numbers look pretty strong, but they're actually being boosted by unusually strong numbers from government and health care that mask other extraordinary weaknesses,” she added.
I think that's the main reason why people are so depressed even though the overall numbers look very good: Most people in the country don't work in health care or (government) related jobs and can't easily move into those jobs.
While these averages may look very rosy, they mask very real challenges and struggles that business owners and job seekers face.
Further evidence of the deliberately engineered economic slowdown that MMT claims is occurring should come tomorrow when the Department of Labor releases its own report on new jobs, which should be encouraging since it will include new government jobs created last month. The ADP report focuses on the private sector.
In the real world, most people still work for themselves or for privately held companies, so the struggle with the effects of MMT will continue.
Related article:
'Modern Monetary Theory' helps fund AOC's Green New Deal
