Taps Coogan – October 1st, 2020

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Ed Yardeni of the highly informative site Yardeni Research, recently spoke with CNBC about why he believes that another multi-trillion dollar stimulus bill may not be needed to see continued economic recovery.

Calling himself “a bit of a contrarian on this issue” he notes:

I think the economy can continue to grow with the kind of fiscal stimulus that’s still in the system from the first round… More importantly than that, we have gotten a tremendous amount of monetary stimulus…”

“The housing led boom is offsetting a lot of the challenges we still have among the pandemic challenged services.”

“The data actually has been consistent with a ‘V-Shaped’ recovery so far.  We had an unprecedented two month lock down recession in March and April in the United States and other places and then we’ve had a recovery ever since then and the latest data through September shows a solid recovery…”

While much of the data is indeed consistent with a relatively snappy recovery, there remains roughly 26 million Americans on state or federal unemployment, a number that has barely improved from the Covid peak of roughly 32 million and is still light-years away from the pre-Covid levels of under 2 million.

Regardless, we are unlikely to find out if “the economy can continue to grow with the kind of fiscal stimulus that’s still in the system” because whether now or after the November election, and regardless of which candidate wins, we are going to get trillions upon trillions of dollars of additional budget busting stimulus one way or the other. Print and spend is, for all intents and purposes, the only point of meaningful bi-partisan agreement left.

Enjoy the full interview above.

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