Unleash Prosperity Hotline – Weekend Edition Issue #824
07/28/2023, 07/29/2023, 07/30/2023
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1) Headline of the Week
LONDON — NatWest Group CEO Alison Rose resigned after a media storm over the termination of Brexit figurehead Nigel Farage’s bank account by sister lender Coutts.
Rose admitted Tuesday to having discussed the details of Farage’s account with a BBC reporter and having thus been the source of a controversial story for which the national broadcaster has since issued an apology.
The “debanking” movement is sinister and serious and it is happening on both sides of the Atlantic. We’re big fans of Nigel Farage for his heroic and improbable crusade and victory on Brexit. The leftist one-world government elitists have never forgiven him for his roadblocking their ambitions. Congrats to the British citizens for reacting in a unified grassroots rage against this injustice. Natwest Group is the British version of Anheuser Busch.
Hats off to the protesters. The backlash against corporate wokism has emerged as a major political and economic force.
Regular readers of the Hotline know that we forecast the decline in inflation from last summer’s 9.2% high – ahead of much of the rest of the crowd. It’s not because we are clairvoyant but because we believe the best forward-looking indicator of future inflation is the commodity price index, aka the CRB index.
Check out the chart below. You can see why we saw inflation falling from last summer’s high water mark as commodity prices sank. But look at what has happened with commodity prices over the past month. They are the highest since last summer. This is despite 11 Fed rate hikes over the past 14 months and is not at all consistent with pushing inflation down to the 2% Fed inflation target.
The best way to bring inflation down is not to raise interest rates - which hurt the economy - but to cut government spending by $1 or $2 trillion – which helps the economy.
3) The Stakes for 2024 Just Got a Lot Bigger – And Pricier
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer celebrated the one-year anniversary of President Biden’s budget-busting climate bill by vowing a much bigger encore if Democrats gain full control of Washington in next year’s election.
“Even though we passed the Inflation Reduction Act you ain’t seen nothing yet,” Schumer told reporters on Wednesday. “We are going to do even bigger and better.”
It’s hard to comprehend a bigger bill than the IRA, which Goldman Sachs says will amount to $1.2 trillion in green energy giveaways.
And the bill’s costs go far beyond mere dollars. Dan Lashof, the U.S. director of the World Resources Institute, says the bill has been "transformative," by embedding environmental justice initiatives into the budget and creating a climate change-industrial complex that could rival the Pentagon’s influence on US business.
Yes, but in an incredibly negative way. The green energy blitz has so far been the biggest industrial policy flop in world history. Some $4 trillion spent on solar and wind power still only provide one-tenth the amount of energy that fossil fuels do. So Schumer's promise to double down is the very dictionary definition of throwing good money after bad.
4) Georgia State Rep. Mesha Mainor on Why She Switched Parties
School choice is important to me because I am that child that it supports. I grew up in an area of the west side of Atlanta where right now, the schools and some of them 97% of the kids can't read, perform simple math. It's dismal. It's bleak. It's high unemployment, it's low life expectancy, low graduation rates.
You name it, it is marginalized. And so this community was the same way it was when I was a little girl. My mother sent me to another school on another side of town using someone else's address. So that was the choice back then. And today, people are still using people's addresses to go to schools and other communities, but it's illegal, and people are going to jail because of that.
And so we cannot let a zip code limit us, especially when the people that are running the schools have the capacity to change the curriculum. They have the capacity to change the times of the school. They have the capacity to change the management of the schools. They have the capacity to give the teachers more opportunities to not be so handcuffed to the system. Leadership is not doing that.
That leadership is Democrat. Leadership and education is just too important of a value for us to let it go without being focused on a moment longer. I've been a Democrat my entire life.
5) Liberal Columnist Explains Why Trump Was Better on Economy
From a column by Edward Luce, US National Editor for the Financial Times:
Under Trump, US blue-collar wage growth beat inflation for the first time in years. Under Biden they have fallen in real terms. This is why barely a third of Americans approve of Biden’s economic record. It is also partly why only a third of African-Americans — an overwhelmingly pro-Democratic bloc — say that Biden’s policies have helped black people…..
There are two points on which Biden has let himself down. The first was his too large stimulus of $1.9 trillion shortly after he took office. That undoubtedly fed inflation. There is nothing he can do about that now. The second — scrapping Trump’s tariffs on a range of imports, including steel and aluminium — Biden could do with a stroke of the pen. It would take a big chunk out of inflation.
