The job market remains strong. We have an economic system with both manufactured shortages and corporate incompetence. Yet the working-class are made to pay for its shortcomings. Why?
Economic system
The most recent jobs report showed an employment increase more robust than expected. The Employment Situation Summary pointed out the following.
Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 263,000 in November, and the unemployment rate was unchanged at 3.7 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Notable job gains occurred in leisure and hospitality, health care, and government. Employment declined in retail trade and in transportation and warehousing.
One would expect that would be great news. But it wasn’t for Wall Street or the Treasury. Right after the government released the November report, Fortune wrote the following.
The S&P 500 was 0.8% lower in morning trading and on track to erase much of what had been a healthy week of gains. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 207 points, or 0.6%, at 34,187, as of 11 a.m. Eastern time, while the Nasdaq composite was 1.2% lower.
Stocks had generally been on the upswing for more than a month on hopes that the worst of the nation’s high inflation may have passed already. That fed expectations for the Federal Reserve to dial down the intensity of its big interest-rate hikes. Such hikes aim to undercut inflation by slowing the economy and dragging down prices for stocks and other investments.
But Friday’s jobs report showed that wages for workers rose 5.1% last month from a year earlier. That’s an acceleration from October’s 4.9% gain and easily topped economists’ expectations for a slowdown. Such jumps in pay are helpful to workers struggling to keep up with soaring prices for everyday necessities. The Federal Reserve’s worry is that too-strong gains could cause inflation to become further entrenched in the economy. That’s because wages make up a big part of costs for companies in services industries, and they could end up raising their own prices further to cover higher wages for their employees.
But expectations are rising for what the Fed will do in 2023. Treasury yields jumped immediately after the jobs report’s release on speculation the Fed may ultimately hike rates higher than thought a few moments before. …
The yield on the two-year Treasury jumped to 4.36% from 4.24% late Thursday. The 10-year yield, which helps set rates for mortgages and many other loans, rose to 3.59% from 3.51%.
“Another month with a strong jobs report and torrid wage gains is a reality check for where we stand in the inflation fight,” said Mike Loewengart, head of model portfolio construction at Morgan Stanley Global Investment Office.
Understand what the above snippet means. The titans that control our economic system are telling you that the good fortune for employees is bad news for them. Worse, our government, via the Fed, will ensure that the good fortune must not continue. In doing so, they will make the working class pay for a defective economic system that frowns on wage increases or an extra few bucks in the pockets of the working class. This is by design. It serves two purposes. It ensures most do not have excess capital to create and innovate on a substantive scale that can compete with those who were invited into our oligarchic class. And second, it demoralizes most into a belief that their current state is inevitable.
One must note that the executives who run our corporations and bribe, read lobby, our neoliberal politicians. are responsible for ALL of the failures within our economic system. While the titans of our economic system claim that supply chain issues, pandemic issues, and wage issues, and worker shortages caused inflation, they are completely wrong. It is their decisions that create our problems.
The following should roll off of our tongue ad nauseam
- Corporate greed is responsible for more than 50% of our inflation.
- Corporate shortsightedness created supply chain-induced shortages. Manufacturing a large percentage of needed products and parts overseas is subject to weather, pandemics, and political uprisings.
- Corporate irresponsibility allowed weather, pandemics, and political uprisings to shock our citizens unnecessarily.
- Working-class America is then asked to pay the bill through higher prices and interest rates. Instead of incentivizing irresponsible corporate executives to pay for their ineptitude. They profit from their bad decisions with higher prices and profits as the corporate-bought government extorts higher interest rates from us.
Corporate America claims there is a worker shortage. If one believes in market dynamics, it is clear that with thousands of intelligent abled-bodied immigrants and refugees on our borders seeking work, there are other dynamics at hand.
We need a complete shift in our economic system. The working class must begin to demand its status as a major stakeholder in our economic system, We allowed an economic system predicated on the working-class being but a unit of labor to metastasize throughout. We are the ones who innovate, do the work, and produce all of our national wealth. It is time that we act on that truth and take control of our economy.
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