Low gasoline prices

No news here. 

A government agency points out the low price of gasoline. CNN celebrates the low price of gas. And Fox Business attributes the low price to Trump's energy agenda. I think Fox would do better to attribute the low price to Trump's economic policies in total, but that's just me.

Low gasoline prices may mean the demand for gasoline is low. Maybe not, because the news today was predicting a high volume of Labor Day traffic. I guess we'll see.

If gas prices are low because demand is low, maybe demand is low because a recession is developing. 

I guess we'll see.

 

All old dates on these news items, for what that's worth.

 

I wanted to look at gasoline demand, but I ended up looking at prices. The price pattern seems about the same for all the data I looked at: A high point near $5 in 2022 ($6 for premium gas) working its way down to about $3 now ($4 for premium) and the decline appears to have stalled at that point.

The "low" we are at now is low compared to 2022 but high compared to 2020. So I don't see anything newsworthy about the recent price of gasoline. But I didn't know till I looked. 

I looked at 5 different graphs of gasoline prices. First, graphs for 3 different areas of the country:

• Average Price: Gasoline, Unleaded Regular (Cost per Gallon/3.785 Liters) in New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA 
• Average Price: Gasoline, All Types (Cost per Gallon/3.785 Liters) in Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD
• Average Price: Gasoline, Unleaded Regular (Cost per Gallon/3.785 Liters) in Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale, AZ

Two more graphs, these showing the average city price for Regular gasoline and High Test:

• Average Price: Gasoline, Unleaded Regular (Cost per Gallon/3.785 Liters) in U.S. City Average
• Average Price: Gasoline, Unleaded Premium (Cost per Gallon/3.785 Liters) in U.S. City Average

My record of prediction is complete failure so don't take my word for this, but I don't see any indication of approaching recession in the price of gasoline. But again, I did have to look or I wouldn't have known.

Going with my gut, I still think Trump's economic policies are moving us toward a depression (not recession). But that's just me. 

By the way...

Somehow the phrase "quantity of money relative to output" does not occur at all, not even once, in either Money Mischief or Free to Choose. 

600 of one, half a dozen of the other

This morning, just after 8 AM, Morning Joe Scarborough showed a tweet from Governor Newsom. It said crime is 400 percent higher in some red state than in some blue state, I don't remember which states.

Paraphrasing the tweet, Scarborough said crime is 400 times higher in the red state.

400 percent higher means 4 times higher. Not 400 times. 

It probably wasn't on purpose. He probably doesn't know. It's math stuff. But really, Joe, get it right!

I googled the tweet for details:

The states are Louisiana and California. And it's not the "crime" rate, it's the murder rate. But the politics of it is not my point. 

Friedman, too, was concerned about abuse of power

Milton Friedman in Free to Choose, page 309:

We have been forgetting the basic truth that the greatest threat to human freedom is the concentration of power, whether in the hands of government or anyone else. We have persuaded ourselves that it is safe to grant power, provided it is for good purposes.

 

See more of Gaio's response at Google Docs

Powell is the only one standing up to Trump

Madmen in authority, who hear voices
in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some
academic scribbler of a few years back.

 

On Morning Joe of 22 August they said again that Trump is always critical of Jerome Powell, the head of the Fed. They did not indicate that Presidents are ordinarily not like that to the head of the Fed. They did not mention that the Fed being "independent" was a decision made on purpose, to protect the economy from a president who might try to usurp power from every nook and cranny of government. 

Based on the MSNBC show, you'd think Trump's behavior was totally normal. It isn't. 

 

Jerome Powell is the only one left in the federal government who is standing up to Trump. You cannot imagine how much respect and admiration I have for Powell.

As part of that same segment, Morning Joe had Christine Romans on, talking about the economy. I remember Romans from the Lou Dobbs days, when Dobbs was just starting to get strange and taking the news personally, well before Dobbs went to FOX. 

But even FOX didn't work out for him. Good job, Dobbs. I count you as one more victim of our failing economy.

Anyway, Christine Romans pointed out that what's going on in the economy now is Trump's doing. It's Trump's economy now. "Trump's tariff economy," she called it.

She's right. It's all on Trump. And the "Trump effect" has only just begun. You think things are bad now? You just wait.

HOW CAN I DISAPPEAR THAT DAMN BUTTON?

Apparently new in Blogger, a round, pale-blue button that will "automatically insert google search links" into the text you are writing in the Blogger Editor.

Sounds like the generation of garbage, to me. But then, that's probably what Google thinks I'm doing, generating garbage.

The first time I tried it, it added this link to my words "round, pale blue button" -- a Google Images page showing... well, you can guess.

Blogger Help from vinay sati says

• This is a new Blogger beta feature, not part of AdSense.
• Blogger scans your post content and automatically turns certain keywords/phrases into links pointing to a Google Search results page.
• The purpose is to give readers more context if they want to explore related topics.

Well, a page full of images of pale blue buttons is not "context" for what I had written. So that's an AI failure, far as I'm concerned.

 vinay sati also says

• The feature is optional and currently in beta.
• It will not apply by default unless you choose to enable it in your Blogger dashboard under “Try new beta features.”
• If you test it and don’t like it, you can simply disable it again from the same menu.

First, I didn't know what the Blogger "dashboard" is, so I had to google that. Yeah, I use it all the time, but I didn't know it was called "dashboard".

Second, apparently it DOES apply by default, as there it is on my screen, ready and waiting for me to accidentally brush up against it.

Third, maybe I could disable the thing, and hide it, if the dashboard had a "Try new beta features" section. 

But thanks, vinay, for trying. 

Anyway, now I've wasted an hour or more of my Dwindling Time Remaining.

J.W. Mason on Recovery from the Next Downturn

"The problems of providing public goods and stabilizing the macroeconomy will not go away just because the federal government steps back from solving them."

- J. W. Mason in "Recovery from the Next Downturn May Depend on State and Local Governments"

History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes

Google's AI Overview: Munich Agreement

The Munich Agreement, signed on September 29-30, 1938, was an agreement between Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Italy, allowing Nazi Germany to annex the Sudetenland, a region of Czechoslovakia with a predominantly German population. This agreement, reached without the participation of Czechoslovakia, is largely seen as a failed attempt at appeasing Adolf Hitler and preventing another world war, which it ultimately failed to do. 

Here's a more detailed breakdown:

Background:
Hitler was aggressively expanding German territory, targeting the Sudetenland, which he claimed was rightfully part of Germany.

The Agreement:
The Munich Agreement essentially ceded the Sudetenland to Germany, with the understanding that Hitler would make no further territorial demands in Europe.

Key Players:
The agreement was signed by Neville Chamberlain (UK), Édouard Daladier (France), Adolf Hitler (Germany), and Benito Mussolini (Italy).

Czechoslovakia's Exclusion:
The Czechoslovakian government was not invited to the negotiations, leading to a feeling of betrayal and abandonment.

Appeasement:
The agreement is a prime example of the policy of appeasement, where Western powers sought to avoid war by conceding to Hitler's demands.

Short-lived Peace:
Despite Chamberlain's declaration of "peace for our time," the agreement did not prevent the outbreak of World War II. Within a year, Hitler had annexed the rest of Czechoslovakia and invaded Poland. 

Consequences:
The Munich Agreement is often viewed as a significant foreign policy blunder, demonstrating the dangers of appeasing aggressive dictators.

The above link to this AI Overview text may turn up somewhat different text.

The phrase used as the title of this post is often attributed to Mark Twain.

Since Trump these days has a role like Neville Chamberlain, I googled neville chamberlain appeasement. The AI Overview told me this:

Neville Chamberlain is primarily known for his policy of appeasement, a diplomatic strategy that involved making concessions to aggressive powers to avoid war. In the 1930s, Chamberlain, as British Prime Minister, pursued appeasement towards Nazi Germany, hoping to avoid another devastating war after World War I. This policy is most famously associated with the Munich Agreement, where Britain and France allowed Germany to annex the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. While Chamberlain believed this would bring "peace for our time," it is now widely viewed as a failure that ultimately emboldened Hitler and contributed to the outbreak of World War II.

 

What is to be done to avoid World War 3? I'm sure I don't know. 

How Trump got elected

On my Test Blog (from 2021) in a post titled "About 8 results", evidence that a Google search for Keynes's phrase "the greatest age of the inducement to investment" turned up 8 results.

Here on this blog (in 2023) a post showing that a Google search for my phrase "debt and civilization" turned up 9 results.

On this blog yesterday, a post showing that my Google search for Milton Friedman's sentence (showing how easy it would be to create a depression) turned up 6 results.

Almost no one is satisfied with our economy these days. But you wouldn't know it from the search results noted above. 

You want to know how Trump got elected? Everyone thinks they know what's wrong with our economy. But only about 6 people know, 8 or 9 at most.

6 results

Perhaps the most important sentence, now certainly the most urgent, in Milton Friedman's Money Mischief:

"There is strong evidence that a monetary crisis involving a substantial decline in the quantity of money is a necessary and sufficient condition for a major depression."

I googled it. Got 6 results -- and one of them was mine. There is very little interest in that particular sentence from Milton Friedman. 

(Item 9 in the Conclusion of Chapter 2. Page 48 in my paperback copy.)

Algorithmic Collusion

If you have access: Bloomberg at

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-30/wharton-experiment-finds-dumb-ai-bots-collude-to-rig-markets

The "Read the research here" link: https://www.nber.org/papers/w34054

Trump's economic strategy

If by some chance you hear Trump take credit for reducing the federal deficit, it will be due to the revenue from his tariffs. Be sure to give him credit, also, for the revenue flowing out of the private sector, and for the economic slowdown that follows.

If the tariff revenue is anywhere near enough to make a dent in the deficit, the resulting slowdown will give new meaning to the word severe. 

His plan appears to be to shift the deficit burden onto the private sector. Trump seems to think that by calling for lower interest rates, he will make this affordable. 

It will not work. The private sector is already too deep in debt. That's why we had the financial crisis of 2008. It took ten years of recovery, then, before we saw even a hint of a decent economy. I predicted that improvement, but it was far weaker than I expected.

Adding to the debt of the private sector is not a viable plan. The outcome will be the Trump Depression.