Summary: * Today is the Wisconsin Primary but Donald Trump has been getting a lot of flack in the media over the last couple of days about his comments about the U.S. economy, particularly in the financial media because Donald Trump has now predicted a "very massive recession" in the U.S. * He didn't just say a recession, he's predicting a massive recession * Most of the pundits on television don't see any recession at all - not even a mild one * So here you have Donald Trump saying, not only is the recession going to be massive, it's going to be very massive * The media is all over Trump: "What is he talking about? The economy is in great shape! He's peddling all kinds of fiction! We have this massive economic growth!" * the President television today taking credit for this great economy with all these years of jobs * Of course what the President doesn't admit to, is, it's not job creation - it's job destruction * We're destroying full time jobs, the by-product of that destruction is that we create a bunch of part-time jobs that people don't really want but that's all they can get * Yet the President is taking credit for that * It's like setting a fire and taking credit for putting it out * That's what the Federal Reserve did with the 2008 Financial Crisis * Let's look at some of the economic news that came out over the past couple of days that resulted in the Atlanta Fed reducing its Q1 GDP estimate - yet again - to .4 * In last Friday's podcast I said that I thought they would be revising it down, and based on the numbers that just came out, they did * One if the reasons the Atlanta Fed cited for the revision was yesterday's release of February Factory Orders * They were expected to be down 1.6; instead it came out as -1.7, which was not that big a miss unless you consider the previous downward revision, which means it dropped from a lower level * That took something out of the GDP numbers as did the very bad auto sales that I did mention in Friday's podcast * Apparently the worse-than-expected trade deficit that came out today didn't even factor into their thinking, and I don't know why, because we were expecting $46.2 billion and instead we got $47.1 billion * That's a pretty big miss, and they took January's estimate which was originally $45.7 billion and raised that to $46.2 billion * We are still expecting the March number which will be factored into Q1 GDP, so I think the Atlanta Fed is still not low enough * Remember, too, one of the things that's helping the Q1 GDP is that most of the country had an unseasonably warm winter, because bad weather is factored into the estimate *
