By Monica Showalter
The monster 1,160 point stock drop on the Dow Jones Industrial Average Wednesday, the highest drop since the advent of the pandemic in 2020 was kind of a … nothingburger for the Biden White House.
According to the Washington Examiner:
The White House downplayed Wednesday’s drop in the stock market and defended the Federal Reserve’s independence after interest rate hikes to curb high inflation.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 1,160 points in the worst day of trading since June 2020 as investors expect further rate increases despite assurances from Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. Many economists think the Fed has been too slow to act to control the price spikes.
“Nothing has changed in how we see the stock market,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters at Wednesday’s briefing. “That’s not something that we keep an eye on every day.”
Seems the Sleepy Joe White House is doing its sleeping. And why wouldn’t they? The private sector is full of price gougers, tax cheats, hoarders, wreckers, and other bogeymen of the left. It’s not about people’s 401(K)s, which is how normal Americans see it. Of course they don’t watch stocks, unless perhaps they are in Congress and there’s some inside trading to be had. Joe, of course, watches money matters intensely too no matter what he claims as a matter of feathering his nest. The abandoned Hunter Biden laptop emails reveal that well enough.
Besides that, Biden has this pattern as the defining feature of his presidency — ignoring events, dismissing anyone warning about them as a conspiracy theorist or callin the problem non-existent or all in our heads — until it gets too big to ignore. We’ve seen this in Biden’s organization of the Afghanistan pullout, in his COVID response, in his pathetic reaction to the rise in oil prices, in his handing of inflation — transitory, rich man’s problem, price gouging, Putin-did-it — and in his current response to baby formula supply-chain and federal shutdown shortages. He’s always reacting, always denying, and then always getting caught flat-footed.
Which is bad stuff, since stock prices are a hell of a lot more than presumed private sector badness for the White House to ignore. Yes, prices go up, and prices go down, and in recent years, there have been big swings.
But stocks also are anticipatory signals, forecasting what the market is expecting on the horizon — in this case, recession, inflation, stagflation, supply chain issues, and an economy grinding to a halt.
Biden makes a big deal about reading all his fancy intelligence reports. But when news is right there in front of his face, well, Sleepy Joe goes back to sleep. Perhaps he’ll get around to reading about it in a few days.