The High Cost of Being Correct About Biden
Earlier this year as I was trying to wrap my head around the Biden administration and the direction, they are taking the country. I wrote in my March 18th column that Biden is the new Carter. I had speculated a scant 2 months ago that inflation was coming, and it would most likely manifest itself in the energy market in particular oil and gas.
According to the AP (https://apnews.com/article/asia-inflation-financial-markets-business-6ed9af7cd51b64e59a720409612e38b5):
“Inflation concerns have been hitting the stock market hard this week. The S&P 500 was down 1.7% in afternoon trading, extending its weekly drop to 3.6%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq was off 2.3%, and it’s now down 4.9% so far this week.”
Consumer prices rose 0.8% in the month of April which was unexpected. This comes on the heels of a disappointing jobs report from April. All of this of course was before a ransomware attack on an oil pipeline took the pipeline down for at least the remainder of this week.
My prediction that Biden shutting down Keystone pipeline, banning fracking on federal land, and reverting back to foreign markets to purchase oil would be a disaster for oil and gas prices. I was concerned that as the economy began to recover and the demand for energy went up that OPEC would squeeze supply to raise the price of oil. I had just assumed we would not of had an oil crisis the size of the one happening right now on the east coast.
An article on the Detroit Free Press (https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2021/05/12/gas-shortage-prices-michigan/5056477001/) website reported “In the Charlotte, North Carolina, area, 71% of stations were out of gas by Wednesday morning, according to GasBuddy. In the Atlanta area, it was about 59%.” Urgent pleas went out to the people of the east coast to only get gas if they needed it and officials told people not to stockpile.
The EPA announced on Wednesday morning the easing of restrictions of semi-truck tankers to aid in the delivery of gas to the region. The only problem with that strategy is the trucking industry is still recovering from the pandemic and there is a shortage in available truck drivers. We have a gas supply shortage causing prices to go up, we have a labor supply shortage causing a supply shortage causing prices to go up, and we have a country flush full of Biden bucks demanding supply.
As warned in the past we were about to enter a cycle of remedial lessons for no reason other than we allowed people with bad ideas to control the narrative in mainstream culture in our country. The lesson about to be learned here is that central planning is a horrible way to manage an economy. King Biden who declared himself the second coming of FDR is in for a rude awakening as he started screwing around with the private sector to advance his so-called racial equity agenda.
In his and his administrations quest for environmental racial social justice whatever they have screwed up the economy. Biden had a gift of a presidency and in fact, if he would have left everything alone and setup some committees to appease the crazies in his party, we would be in a different place than where we are about to end up in the next 90 days. We can all hope that Biden will end his ridiculous quest to spend gobs of money and focus on the real crisis we have popping up around us.