Late last week, sites like Vox and Newsweek warned that Biden’s attempt to sell American inflation as “Putin’s price hike” was not working in opinion polls.
The American president, on his social media accounts, then offered an alternative villain: “Do you want to lower inflation? the richest corporations pay your share.”
It was too much for Jeff Bezosowner of Amazon and the Washington Post, who scoffed that the Biden administration would need to engage its newly created — and much-criticized — Council on Disinformation to revise the message.
Bezos argued: “It is valid to discuss corporate taxes. It is essential to discuss how to tame inflation. Mixing them is only to divert”. He remembered the stimulus of the government itself as a cause of inflation.
At a conference reported by Bloomberg, Tesla’s Elon Musk agreed: “The honest reason for inflation is that the government has printed a zillion extra money.” As a consequence, he now projects “recession”.
“It’s probably going to be tough for, I don’t know, a year, maybe 18 months,” Musk said, adding that “this administration doesn’t seem to do much,” threatening to vote Republican in 2024.
It echoed a CBS interview with Goldman Sachs senior chairman Lloyd Blankfein in which the banker pointed to “very, very high” risk of recession in the US economy. “We’re definitely walking [para ela].”
And he, too, blamed “too much stimulus” on inflation that is paving the way for recession.
MONEY ONLY IN THE PENTAGON
The US editor at the Financial Times, Edward Luce, wrote of the “strong imbalance” in US foreign policy towards Asia, focused on military spending and agreements against China, but without “serious economic initiatives”.
That’s how, “at the summit with Southeast Asian leaders, Biden announced a modest fund of $150 million, equivalent to a few days of Chinese investment in his Belt and Road Initiative — or about two hours of spending by the Pentagon”.
GLOBAL VISION
American Billboard, with cover and digital headlines, turned to “Anitta’s Global Vision”, her “trilingual take” of the world.
The English The Economist, citing polls by Brazilian journalists, speculates “why” so many records and songs from 1972 are still treated as the best.
