Posted on 02/08/2019 7:35:21 AM PST by SeekAndFind
The Wall Street Journal has been against Trump’s trade tariffs, and any chance they get they will put blame on the tariffs for bad things, even when it is obvious they are not to blame.
On Thursday they had a front-page story which attributed a wave of Chapter 12 bankruptcies (50 total in the U.S.) partially to small tariffs put in place by Trump in 2018. Any business reporter with a brain knows that those small tariffs had nothing to do with bankruptcies that occurred in 2018. Those farmers had to be struggling with too much debt for years, and finally threw in the towel to do a bankruptcy workout program. So the tariffs absolutely did not cause the bankruptcies in 2018.
It is the debt that caused the problem, not a minor decrease in prices in 2018. Farmers also had record corn and soybean production and yields in 2018. The extra yield would have helped. Has the WSJ attempted to determine how much of the price decrease is related to extra yield and inventory, or are they so wedded to blaming Trump for the tariffs that they don’t care?
If the WSJ would like to blame anyone for the higher bankruptcies in 2018, why don’t they blame the Federal Reserve? The Federal Reserve kept interest rates artificially low for years, which encouraged farmers and others to chase up the price of risk assets, like farmland, to higher values than the crop prices and rent prices would otherwise support. They kept the rates low because President Obama’s economic policies did little or nothing to help the private sector and the only way to get slow growth was to punish savers and push up the price of risk assets.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Who was the fake news “journalist” who wrote that crap? And who was the editor who approved it for publication?
At this point, I’m starting to think that free traders and wacko environmentalists get their plays from the same book.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.