This is your periodic reminder that the net worth of U.S. households is $151 trillion but there's only $2.3 trillion fiat currency in circulation anyway

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TNWBSHNO

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CURRCIR 

Meanwhile all the gold and silver in the world hardly close the gap: 

 

 

You idiots who attend the Vaccine Church have just helped mint 9 new pharma-billionaires

Pandemic sweeps the nation.

Fascist America under Trump mobilizes pharmaceutical industry to rush vaccines into development, investing billions of dollars in the efforts.

Industry resurrects a discredited drug delivery mechanism and calls it a vaccine. Smelling $$$, it prepares for mass vaccination but doesn't run trials proportionate to that effort, and then cuts off the placebo arm prematurely, making a complete hash of it.

Government gives Emergency Use Authorization, not FDA Approval, to permit these corporations to experiment on the US population during an "emergency".

The corporations, and the government, are exempted from liability.

A fearful population whipped into a hysteria by propaganda paid for with borrowed dollars lines up like sheep to take the vaccine under a new administration but the same old fascism.

Presto! 9 new billionaires:

The 9 new vaccine billionaires, in order of their net worth are: 

1. Stéphane Bancel, Moderna’s CEO (worth $4.3 billion)
2. Ugur Sahin, CEO and co-founder of BioNTech (worth $4 billion)
3. Timothy Springer, an immunologist and founding investor of Moderna (worth $2.2bn)
4. Noubar Afeyan, Moderna’s Chairman (worth $1.9 billion)
5. Juan Lopez-Belmonte, Chairman of ROVI, a company with a deal to manufacture and package the Moderna vaccine (worth $1.8 billion)
6. Robert Langer, a scientist and founding investor in Moderna (worth $1.6 billion)
7. Zhu Tao, co-founder and chief scientific officer at CanSino Biologics (worth $1.3 billion)
8. Qiu Dongxu, co-founder and senior vice president at CanSino Biologics (worth $1.2)
9. Mao Huihua, also co-founder and senior vice president at CanSino Biologics (worth $1 billion)

			The 8 vaccine billionaires who saw their wealth increase are: Name Role/description $ billions 2021 $ billions 2020 Jiang Rensheng & family Chair, Zhifei Biological products $ 24.40 $ 7.60 Cyrus Poonawalla Founder, Serum Institute of India $ 12.70 $ 8.20 Tse Ping Sinopharm $ 8.90 $ 7.30 Wu Guanjiang Co-founder, Zhifei Biological products $ 5.10 $ 1.80 Thomas Struengmann & family Portfolio includes Germany's BioNTech and Uruguay's Mega Pharma $ 11.00 $ 9.60 Andreas Struengmann & family Portfolio includes Germany's BioNTech and Uruguay's Mega Pharma $ 11.00 $ 9.60 Pankaj Patel Controls listed company Cadila Healthcare. The company now manufactures drugs to treat Covid-19 such as Remdesivir from Gilead. Its Covid-19 vaccine, ZyCoV-D, is undergoing clinical trials. $ 5.00 $ 2.90 Patrick Soon-Shiong ImmunityBio - selected for the US federal government's "Operation Warp Speed" to help quickly develop a Covid-19 vaccine. $ 7.50 $ 6.40

Dianne Feinstein shouldn't only be censured by the US Senate, California voters should vote for her opponent in November

From the story here:

Regardless of the fate of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination, the Senate should censure the ranking Democratic member of the Judiciary Committee, Dianne Feinstein. Her deception and maneuvering, condemned across the political spectrum, seriously interfered with the Senate’s performance of its constitutional duty to review judicial nominations, and unquestionably has brought the Senate into “dishonor and disrepute,” the standard that governs these matters. As a matter of institutional integrity, the Senate cannot let this wrong go unaddressed. ... Feinstein ... sought to keep her committee from timely and properly investigating an apparently serious charge of misconduct, and is still doing so, even in the face of criticism from all (or most) quarters. ...

As the second-richest member of the Senate, with a net worth of $94 million, Feinstein is presumably above the temptations to which [censured Senators] Dodd, Talmadge, and Durenberger succumbed. She does, however, face a difficult reelection campaign, with a serious enthusiasm gap on her left, the California Democratic party having refused to endorse her bid for a sixth term in office. Her conduct in arranging matters to make her appear the champion of an allegedly abused constituent, and perhaps positioning herself as the woman who sank the Kavanaugh nomination, can only help on that flank. Is a nakedly political motive for senatorial misbehavior any less reprehensible than a financial one?

Sum Ting Wong: Low top marginal tax rates since 1986 have NOT delivered

Low top marginal tax rates have NOT delivered since 1986.

The average top marginal rate has been 38% for the last thirty years, 49% lower than the average rate of 75% which prevailed from 1956 until the Reagan tax reform of 1986.

After the reform, stocks have done little better than before, but gross public debt has increased at a rate 21% higher than before, growth of current dollar GDP has plunged by 66%, and growth of household net worth has slowed by 48%.

Where did the gains from the Reagan tax cuts go?

You know the answer. The number of US billionaires has exploded from just 41 in 1987 to 536 in 2015, up 1,207%. The money has gone into the pockets of the few, instead of into investment. From 1960 to 1986 net domestic investment grew 846% whereas in the 30 years since 1986 the metric has grown by only 117%, a contraction of 86% under the more favorable personal income tax regime.

The lesson seems clear.

Higher marginal income tax rates force the wealthy to invest in business and derive their income from investments taxed at the preferred lower long term capital rates. Lower marginal personal income tax rates, however, entice them away from going through all the trouble, in turn depriving the economy of growth, employees of growing incomes and wealth, and the government of revenue.

Like the formerly sound public policy which invented the 30-year mortgage to force people to save for the future in the housing piggy bank, the time has come to reincentivize business owners to invest more in their businesses by making the personal income option less attractive.

Neither Republican tax bill does this. 

  

Trump's critics of his investment success need to get a new calculator, and some brains

This morning on the Chris Plante Show on WMAL a caller complained that Trump inherited $200 million and that anyone could have $10 billion after 30 years, too, just by investing in a CD.

Chris Plante said "that's some CD"!

This meme is now ubiquitous in the media critical of Trump, and while not as obviously silly as this morning's example the critics nevertheless display remarkable investment ignorance.

Grant for a moment that Trump inherited $200 million, and keep in mind that that is the upper end of the estimates, which go as low as $40 million. Also keep in mind it's mostly real estate, not cash, not stocks, not bonds, a completely different business.

$200 million invested in the S&P 500 for 30 years from 1985 to 2015 yielded $4.2 billion, or just 42% of the net worth Trump claims to have accumulated over the period. The actual average nominal rate of return for the S&P 500 was 10.75% per annum, dividends fully reinvested. The $10 billion net worth claim, on the other hand, represents an annual net rate of return of 13.93%, again assuming the investment of $200 million, almost 30% better every year than what the S&P 500 actually yielded. But again, the S&P 500 return is not net. You still have to deduct taxes, inflation and expenses from that, which is an individual calculation and highly variable, and in New York can be quite onerous. 

On the other end of the scale, the investment of $40 million becoming $10 billion is the equivalent of a net return of 20.21% per annum, 88% better than the S&P 500 nominal return every year on average.

The truth probably lies somewhere in between, but no matter how you cut it, Donald Trump capitalized on what he was given in a way which has been exceptionally more successful than what most people ever experience.

He's Yuge.

Gov. Scott Walker has large personal debt problems, consistent with reports of his negative net worth

Reported here:

"The Re­pub­lic­an pres­id­en­tial can­did­ate has cast him­self as both a fisc­al con­ser­vat­ive lead­er and a penny-pinch­ing every­man on the cam­paign trail, of­ten tout­ing his love of Kohl’s, the dis­count de­part­ment store. His newly pub­lished fin­an­cial dis­clos­ure shows that, like many Amer­ic­ans, Walk­er has few as­sets, some ma­jor debts (in­clud­ing more than $100,000 for stu­dent loans for his chil­dren), and a pun­ish­ing in­terest rate on his cred­it-card ob­lig­a­tions. Walk­er in­curred one cred­it-card debt with Barclays in 2014, ac­cord­ing to the fin­an­cial dis­clos­ure form, and owed between $10,000 and $15,000 at a 27.24 per­cent in­terest rate as of Ju­ly 2015. ... One of Walk­er’s cred­it-card debts, to Bank of Amer­ica, dates back to 2011, his first year as gov­ernor, ac­cord­ing to the dis­clos­ure form. Walk­er cur­rently owes between $10,000 and $15,000 on that one, with an in­terest rate of 11.99 per­cent."

Estimated net worth of Democrats for president in 2016

Chafee $43 million

Clinton $21.5 million

Warren $6.69 million

Webb $4.6 million

Biden $600,000

Sanders $330,506

Estimated net worth of Republicans for president in 2016

Trump $10 billion

Fiorina $59 million

Carson $10 million

Bush $10 million

Santorum $5 million

Huckabee $5 million

Christie $4 million

Cruz $3.17 million

Perry $3 million (out already)

Jindal $2.7 million

Kasich $2.5 million

Paul $1.33 million

Graham $1.02 million

Rubio $443,500

Walker ($71,500), that's right, he's in the hole

Reuters agrees: the middle class is worse off now than when Obama took office

Here:

Federal Reserve survey data show families in the middle fifth of the income scale now earn less and their net worth is lower than when Obama took office. ...

In the middle, the economy has shed positions - whether in traditional trades like machining or electrical work, white-collar jobs in human resources, or technical ones like computer operators. ... 

Between 2010 and 2013, as recovery took hold and stock markets soared, the average net worth of families in the top 40 percent of income earners grew. For all others average net worth shrank, declining 19 percent for the middle fifth. Similarly, the average earnings for families in the top 10 percent grew more than 9 percent from 2010 through 2013, while those at other levels stagnated or shrank. For the middle fifth, average earnings fell 4.6 percent. Over the six years through 2013, the middle fifth's average annual family earnings fell to $47,243 from $53,008 while their average net worth dropped to $170,066 from $236,525.

Household net worth declines for first time since 2011

Net worth of $3,650 puts you in the top half globally

So quit complaining.

Story here.

FiveThirtyEight Economists Assert But Don't Demonstrate Distributional Characteristics Of Great Recession Spending Pullback

I refer to "Why the Housing Bubble Tanked the Economy And the Tech Bubble Didn’t" by AMIR SUFI and ATIF MIAN, here, where they basically blame the spending pullback of the Great Recession on the poorest, most indebted homeowners:

"The poor cut spending much more for the same dollar decline in wealth. This fact is one of the most robust findings in all of macroeconomics, ... It also makes intuitive sense."

Their forthcoming book may show this, but this article surely doesn't.

They present data which tell us about homeowners' housing as a share of their net worth by quintiles, their mortgages as a share of their home values by quintiles, and about the net worth of richest and poorest homeowners. These are useful distributional observations which, unfortunately, in the case of spending are missing in the presentation! You'd think they would be present in a story which attacks traditional economists like Ben Bernanke for ignoring distributional data sets. Ah, yeah.

Apart from whether showing the distributional characteristics of the spending pullback is even possible, I wonder if it makes any sense that the poorest homeowners could cut their spending enough to account for the sums involved, which is what traditional economists wonder. Weren't they the ones primarily represented in the 5.6 million who lost their homes to foreclosure in the first place?

Using November 2007 real retail and food service sales as the baseline ($179.37 billion), the cumulative month to month shortfall from that to November 2012 came to $663.09 billion. Yes, it took five full years for real retail to recover. But the peak to trough decline in real GDP from 4Q2007 to 2Q2009 alone, on the other hand, was $639.2 billion, not even half way through the great retail depression. Retail spending shows only part of the picture.

Which is why it's wrong to imply, as the authors do, that the decline in spending, supposedly linked to the poorest homeowners, explains the Great Recession. It only explains about a third of it, but just how much of that can be blamed on the poorest homeowners remains a mystery.

Total Household Net Worth Rises About 3.5% In Real Terms Since April 2007 Through The Last Quarter Of 2013

I used all items CPI of about 13.17% from April 2007 to date, not seasonally adjusted, on April 2007 peak household net worth of $68.82486 trillion.

This yields $77.889 trillion to record date in Q4 2013, meaning the current dollar figure of $80.66 trillion of household net worth represents a real gain, that is an inflation adjusted gain, of about 3.5% in household net worth since April 2007, over six years ago. That's not really saying very much.

The Fed is cited here as saying the vast majority of the increase in household net worth is attributable to rising stock prices, which rose in value by a factor of 2.4 times the rise of housing values, owing to the nearly 30% rise in the stock market in 2013:

The Fed said household net worth rose 14 percent in the full year, driven by a $5.6 trillion rise in the value of shares and a $2.3 trillion increase in the value of real estate.

Using the Wilshire 5000, total stock market capitalization increased $5.65 trillion in nominal terms in 2013. But a mere 20% correction to today's market would wipe out over $4.8 trillion in an instant, and a 40% crash would annihilate over $9.5 trillion.

Housing prices overall have reached a valuation nearly 20% above the long term mean level, which means to some that we are in a reinflated housing bubble. The Case Shiller Home Price Index is up almost 10% just in the last year. The high end of normal on the index used to be 140. Today we are in excess of 150. So reversion to the mean could easily wipe out the $2.3 trillion increase from 2013, and then quite a bit more.

The real increase in net worth may be nothing more than a Fed induced mirage based on artifically cheap money and grotesquely punitive rates of return on same which encourage speculation in asset classes like stocks and real estate.

Wise men know what wicked things are written on the skies.

Sorry Charlie, Household Net Worth Remains In Depression: Still 15% Off 2007 Peak

From the newly issued 2012 annual report of the St. Louis Federal Reserve here, taking the nominal figures in the March Z.1 Flow of Funds Release of the Federal Reserve and adjusting them both for inflation and population growth since 2007:

"Clearly, the 91 percent recovery of wealth losses portrayed by the aggregate nominal measure paints a different picture than the 45 percent recovery of wealth losses indicated by the average inflation-adjusted household measure. Considering the uneven recovery of wealth across households, a conclusion that the financial damage of the crisis and recession largely has been repaired is not justified."

Gold: Over 60 Million Krugerrands Circulate, More Than All Others Combined

So says the Rand Refinery's latest brochure, here, showing 2012 mint specimens. Figures through 2008 previously indicated 46 million ounces minted.

These 60 million Krugerrands are not all 1 oz. coins, but if they were, that would mean something like $96 billion worth with current gold prices around $1,600 the ounce.

Presumably therefore, there must be something like 110 million gold coins of all kinds out there if Krugerrands represent more than all the rest combined, with a current value of roughly $176 billion.

Not very much real money when you get right down to it.

Of course, there's lots of bars out there which can be turned into coin.

Official global gold reserves as of last summer were approaching 31,000 metric tons (2,204.6 lbs each), for a grand total of 68,342,600 lbs, which is 1,093,481,600 ounces, in other words, potentially about 1.093 billion more gold coins, with a current estimated value of $1.75 trillion.

Add the current gold coinage and you've got a potential $1.93 trillion in gold money for the world at current prices, 1.2 billion one ounce gold coins, or 12 billion tenth ounce gold coins, or 1.6 tenth ounce gold coins for every man, woman and child on the planet (7.1 billion), or $256 each.

Equality is such a bummer.

Meanwhile at home, current net worth of US households and non-profits in US funny money is $66.072 trillion, or $210 billion for every man, woman and child in the country.

Now, that's more like it!

Ben Bernanke Is Trying But Failing Miserably At Money Printing

And it's not exactly his fault.

Historically in the postwar period, the increase in Total Credit Market Debt Outstanding (TCMDO) has closely shadowed the increase in Total Net Worth, seemingly helping to finance it, until the late great recession when for the first time, and very briefly, net worth flagged below the level of the debt owed. (Ignoramuses in the Doomosphere everywhere cried "Insolvency" at the time, not understanding the meaning of the term "net"). Ex post facto, net worth has made a dramatic upswing while the debt owed has increased at a much reduced rate by historical standards. To quote a famous president, "That doesn't make any sense."

Despite all the debt naysayers out there, total credit market debt is not increasing at anything like it should be, and appears to be disconnected to a significant degree from the recent increase in total net worth, which is up 29% since its nadir at the beginning of 2009, or $14.7 trillion. For the whole five year period from July 2007 (the last time TCMDO doubled, going back to 1999) to July 2012, TCMDO increased at a rate of just 12% and real GDP increased just 2.9%, whereas TCMDO increased at a rate of 100% between 1949 and 2007 on average every 8.25 years. The shortest doubling times have included two periods of 6 years each, one of 6.75 years, one of 8 years, one of 9.5 years, one of 10 years, and one of 11.5 years. The very worst real GDP performance of all of those was for a 6 year doubling period when we got 14% real GDP, nearly 5 times better than we're getting now. All the rest posted real GDP of between 23% and 56%.

It is evident that Ben Bernanke's quantitative easing program (right scale) anticipated the leveling off of TCMDO (left scale). Clearly he expected the troubled banks to need a push to keep the credit money creation process going, but didn't understand how fruitless it would be. One notes that he has added about $2 trillion to the monetary base from the middle of the late great recession. By contrast, TCMDO is up (only!) $9 trillion from the beginning of 2007. By historical standards TCMDO should be up $25 trillion by now if TCMDO is to double again in ten years from 2007. And it should be up a lot more than even $25 trillion by now if it's to double sooner than ten years. At the average doubling time of 8.25 years, the $49.8 trillion of TCMDO in July 2007 should hit $99.684 trillion by October of 2015 if the postwar pattern is to continue. Instead, at the current rate of growth in TCMDO, it's going to take an unprecedented 27 years to double it, unless of course there are limits to borrowing to fuel growth, as many are beginning to tell us. In either event one can only assume there will be only pathetic real GDP growth going forward, if there is any at all.

Clearly something is horribly amiss in the transmission process of credit money creation for the first time in the postwar. Seemingly gargantuan quantities of money from the Fed through the process of quantitative easing should be seeding the banks who in turn should be creating massive amounts of credit way beyond the $9 trillion so far created. Instead, the banks are doing something else with it, by-passing the normal distribution channel. Some of the seed money is being held back to comply with increased capital requirements, to be sure, but more appears to be going directly into household net worth creation through investment gains from the stock market, enriching a very few bondholders, shareholders and banking industry players through the private trading desks of the banks, a unique development by historical standards made possible only since 1999 with the abolition of Glass-Steagall through the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. As an act of Congress, Ben Bernanke can't do much about that even if he is the most powerful man in the country.

In the absence of a creative policy change from the Fed whereby Congressional intent would be thwarted and money would actually reach the marketplace through a different avenue than the uncooperative banks, one must conclude that the Fed thinks it necessary to continue the various easing schemes because it judges the banks to be still too fragile to risk stopping them. That would be putting the best construction on the matter, to borrow a phrase from Luther's catechism. Either that, or the Fed itself has been completely captured by the bankers.

This Is A Depression, Says Dem. Billionaire Mort Zuckerman

"We believe we live in more normal times—and we do not. Millions of people today are experiencing exactly the same struggle as the millions did in the Great Depression. They can't find work. They depend on government and philanthropy. They live on hope denied. ...

"The reality is, we are experiencing a modern-day Depression. It is harder to find work than it has been in any previous economic recovery period. ...

"The Pew Research Center reports that for the first time in the post-World War II era, middle-class families finished the decade significantly poorer in terms of household net worth—which is down almost 40 percent since 2007—and with lower incomes than a decade earlier. This has hit the middle class harder than any other group. According to Pew, one third of Americans now identify themselves as lower class or lower middle class, a deterioration since 2008 when one quarter identified themselves that way. ...

"We are living through a breakdown of the great American jobs machine. This is not a recovery. Annual GDP growth in 2010 and 2011 averaged a mere 2.4 percent; in 2012, GDP growth slowed to 1.8 percent. In other words, cumulative growth for the last 11 quarters was just 6.8 percent, less than half the 15.2 percent average growth in GDP after previous recessions over a similar period of time. This is the slowest growth rate following all 11 post-World War II recessions. ...

"No recession since the end of World War II has been as deep or as long as this one, severely testing the optimism, confidence, and animal spirits that typify the temper of America. The question of the hour is how can we find a way to avoid becoming a low-wage, part-time country."

Read the full story, "How We Can End Our Modern-Day Depression," from Mort Zuckerman, here. 

On 4th Anniversary Of TARP, 12% Of Banks Are Still In Trouble

nonperforming bank loans as percentage of total

The FDIC reports as of June that it has 7,246 member banks with $14 trillion in assets. Four years ago there were 8,384 member banks with assets of $13.6 trillion. Bank failures and consolidation in the industry have reduced the total membership by over 13 percent in the interim.

Bank failures have cost the Deposit Insurance Fund, funded by member premiums, in excess of $80 billion, costs which are inevitably passed on to bank customers. TARP was deliberately morphed into a fascist capital injection scheme when it became clear that identifying and buying toxic mortgages was an unworkable solution, cooked up as it was in a panic. The capital injections effectively made taxpayers unwilling stockholders in troubled "financial" institutions, some of which were not commercial banks to begin with but were allowed to become so to obtain protection.

Meanwhile bank nonperforming loans in the US continue at a high level, over three times higher than prior to the financial crisis in 2008, despite TARP's measly billions, and despite the real action trying to circumvent free-market capitalism involving trillions of dollars of Federal Reserve liquidity interventions.

An unofficial list of problem banks tracked here currently shows 874 institutions still under some form of FDIC supervision for irregularities of one kind or another, four years after the passage of the Troubled Asset Relief Program signed by President Bush on October 3, 2008.

Sen. Barack Obama voted for the TARP program in the US Senate, as did Sen. John McCain, his opponent for the presidency, joining the rest in the US Congress who wanted to make it appear they were doing something about the crisis. In the wake of TARP the stock market crashed anyway in the succeeding month, preparing the way for the debacle of March 2009 five months later. The mortgage market remains effectively dead, along with housing, net worth, and employment, zombies all. 

How much better off we would be today if we had simply embraced the failure prescribed by capitalism instead of denying it. Bankruptcy courts would have been busy selling off assets to responsible actors, debts would have been adjudicated, and a few high profile bad players may have actually gone to trial, and jail, by now.

Instead it's just more of the same: government of the bankers, by the bankers, and for the bankers.

Republicans Still Don't Get It: Obama Is Not Carter Redivivus

Until the Republican Party comes to grips with the fact that the Bushes were two of the very worst presidents for the economy in the post-war period, it is never going to understand the current problem and offer America a decent alternative, which is that Obama is continuing in the Bushes' footsteps and is actually worse than them, if that were possible.

Obama is the second coming of George Bush, not of Jimmy Carter.

If only we had an economy like Jimmy Carter's, lousy as it was for its time. But total household net worth never increased more as a percentage than under his short tenure, and he ranked third best in the post-war period for increasing housing values. Those two categories, incidentally, were also where his successor Ronald Reagan shined the brightest as well.

Erick Erickson should know better:

"There are a lot of elitist Republicans who have spent several years telling us Mitt Romney was the only electable Republican. Because the opinion makers and news media these elitists hang out with have concluded Romney will not win, the elitists are in full on panic mode. They conspired to shut out others, tear down others, and prop up Romney with the electability argument. He is now not winning against the second coming of Jimmy Carter. They know there will be many conservatives, should Mitt Romney lose, who will not be satisfied until every bridge is burned with these jerks, hopefully with the elitist jerks tied to the bridge as it burns."

Mitt Romney is a fiscally conservative social liberal who doesn't really have a home in either of the two major political parties, which is why he's being attacked from all sides. It is not because of his social liberalism but because of his fiscal conservatism. Which is to say that both parties have expunged that idea from their lexicons since LBJ and no one really knows what it even means anymore.

But Romney may indeed know, and always gives the impression of knowing, which is why he is having a likeability problem. He comes off as the bad banker who won't increase your credit limit until you start catching up on your payments.

No one really likes a guy like that, but that is the kind of guy whom we most need right now, holding the veto pen. If he loses, fear of that will be the reason.

No one likes a spending party pooper.

Can Liberals Count? Can Liberals Remember?

George Bush won Ohio in 2004 by 118,000 votes, but Andrew Sullivan remembers it differently, here:

"At this point in 2004, one recalls, George W. Bush was about to see a near eight-point lead shrivel to a one-state nail-biter by Election Day."

The real nail-biters were in Iowa, where Bush won by just 10,000 popular votes (7 electoral college votes), and in New Mexico, where Bush won by just 6,000 popular votes (5 electoral college votes), neither of which separately or together would have given victory to Democrat John Kerry.

Be that as it may, the real point of Sullivan's story is this:

"If Obama wins, to put it bluntly, he will become the Democrats’ Reagan."

Ah, no, he'll become the Democrats' W, or maybe their George H. W. Bush. Or if he's really really lucky maybe their Richard Nixon.

Obama's economic performance in the next four years would have to improve by 40 percent in seven key categories of economic measurement in comparison with all previous presidents to achieve the fair-to-poor record achieved by Ronald Reagan, whom I have shown elsewhere scored a lousy 42, just like Jimmy Carter.

President Obama's current score after 4 years is already 2 points worse than George Bush's score of 51 after 8 years, the worst two records in the post-war period. That means Obama would have to pull out  of his hat a veritable golden age to make him look as good as Reagan, which as I've said isn't saying much. To do it Obama would have to score a 32 in the next four years just to average out to a 42.

Can you imagine an Obama second term turning in an overall performance roughly close to that of JFK/LBJ, who rank 4th best out of 10 since WWII? Because that is what it would take.

Obama would have to go from worst for unemployment to 4th (think Clinton and W), starting tomorrow. He would have to go from worst to 4th for GDP (think Reagan and Eisenhower), for the next four years. He would have to go from worst to 4th for housing values (think Harry Truman). Only George Bush has been worse for the increase in Americans' total household net worth than Obama has been. To address that Obama would have to restore at least 1960s levels of prosperity to the country, if not Clinton era levels.

Fat chance.

Despite all the ruin which one man can rain down on a country through sheer incompetence and arrogance, the American people are a resilient lot and things will improve no matter who gets elected. The economy adjusts and moves on, and in many respects there is only one way to go but up. But if it's Obama who is elected again, I don't expect him to finish much better than a 48 after 8 years overall, because the first 4 have been such a disaster.