Hand-To-Mouth Economics

We remain old-fashioned enough to believe that an economy needs to produce stuff to remain prosperous and balanced—-whether it be cars, toasters, frozen pizzas, fracked oil, new houses or electrical current. So today’s release on October industrial production is worth pondering.

In the first place, throughout the vaunted longest recovery in history after the Great Recession, up to and including the peak of the Donald’s alleged MAGA coda to it, there was not much to write home about.