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Yves are here tonight. We are very concerned about politics, because to be honest, my WiFi is malfunctioning, my hotspot is not working properly, and I am consuming the bandwidth of the local JCC. This is the South, and another spare Starbucks has also closed down. It’s horrible that this happens during fundraising events at any time, but it reminds us of how fragile our personal infrastructure is.

In essence, the position assumes that employment will continue to improve. This photo depends on Covid’s performance in winter. But it has not noticed that consumer sentiment has fallen sharply. If this situation continues, it will create its own reality.

Author: Barkley Rosser, Professor of Economics at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia.Originally published on Economic Voice

On the first page of today’s Washington Post, a poll was reported showing that when asked about a random sample, 46% of people said they would vote for ordinary Republican candidates for Congress, while 43% said Vote for ordinary Democratic candidates. Given that there are reports of further support for the Republican Party’s constituency vote, if it is held in the middle of next year, the Republican Party will definitely control the House of Representatives, even if it is not the Senate. It looks bad for the Democrats or Biden and Harris.

There must be something that doesn’t look good now. Covid-19 cases have begun to increase again, if not sharply, but according to the latest report, in 35 states, the death toll seems to have stopped falling, if not starting to rise again. Of course, this may be because we now have 80% of adults who have been vaccinated at least once, and we may be able to handle some increased cases without increasing the number of hospitalizations and deaths, because more than 90% of them are in hospitals and deaths are unvaxxed. But this is something that Biden has always emphasized and worked hard, and bad news has emerged, even if it is partly due to the bad behavior of his critics (vaccinations, wearing masks).

Foreign policy may not have been part of the latest decline, but the chaotic nature of the end of the war in Afghanistan reduced Biden’s rating by about 5% a few months ago, undermining his previously generally favorable foreign policy rating. Although the G20 and Glasgow summits have clearly been successful overall, this may not be a big problem now, although the damage seems inevitable.

The entire noise about education and CRT caused by the Virginia governor’s campaign may have exacerbated the Democratic problem, but the more obvious serious problem is inflation. The most recent annualized rate report was 6.2%, which dominated the headlines. October may be today. Punctuation marks for particularly bad poll ratings. This is combined with reports of the upcoming Christmas shortage, even including Santa Claus, which look ugly. It is not yet clear about some of these shortages, such as ports and truck drivers, but these problems are now deeply entrenched, and there is not much improvement, not to mention the continued chip shortage that has pushed up prices in the auto industry. This price spike is especially caused by energy. According to reports, the increase in gasoline prices in Virginia is a factor in winning the Republican governor’s election. This is a lot of things I heard before the election here.

So there must be something that looks bad in every way or is actually bad. But can they really justify these bad polls? Do people really want to choose those who are currently running around trying to do everything they can to kowtow to Donald J. Trump? There are reports on the Glasgow Climate Summit, but most of them have been reported that it will only increase oil and gas prices. The true climate activists think it is not enough, while others think it is terrible inflation. what.

In any case, there are many that look good. One is employment. Although it has not returned to pre-pandemic levels, it continues to rise and wages have been rising. In September, our number of resignations hit a record high, which probably shows that people are confident in finding a better job and they quit their current jobs. Although there are still a large number of people withdrawing from the labor market for various reasons, there are still some unemployed who have difficulty getting re-employment. So it’s not perfect, but it’s mainly a large-scale improvement, and most of them are very good.

Then there is the stock market. Trump claimed that if Biden is elected, the stock market will collapse. It has indeed fallen from its historical highs in the past week, but the Dow Jones Index is still 36,000 points above the famous Glassman-Hassett level. In the eyes of many people, this is still an overvalued market, and certainly not a market that has collapsed. But, of course, many people are not so directly affected by the market.

In addition, Biden has just signed the hard infrastructure bill today. Most public opinion polls show that the bill is very popular and even gained some Republican support in Congress, even though Republican leaders and Trump are clearing or punishing those votes. People who support the bill. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party has done a poor job of publicizing this achievement and its content. Obviously, they need to do more in this area, although we know that various Republican congressmen will boast that part of it provides funds to their states and territories, even if they vote against it.

Finally, although the media’s recognition of this seems to be zero, the sharp increase in gasoline prices seems to have ended. The price of crude oil has fallen from approximately US$85 per barrel to approximately US$80 per barrel in the past three weeks. Crude oil prices are the main driver of gasoline retail prices, but they are lagging. Indeed, although I have not seen national data, it seems that gasoline prices may have completely stopped rising in recent weeks, and if crude oil prices do not resume their rise, they may even fall. This happened where I was. It was frozen at $3.29 per gallon and dropped by 5 cents over the weekend. These are not news, but more talk about rising gasoline prices. We will have to wait and see, but next month’s inflation report may drop significantly. If so, will anyone notice, or will we start to hear some other so-called horrors?