May 8—The May 6 report of April U.S. employment rising by 428,000 and finally back to the mid-2019 level of approximately 151 million, was falsely claimed by the White House, and plunging Wall Street, as showing the fall in U.S. GDP did not mean recession. But it was full of signs of accelerating decline of an economy brought down by NATO war policy and central bank money-printing. The “small stuff” was that the rate of wage and salary increases in the United States fell from an annual 5.5% to 4.3%, which is just half of even the official rate of inflation; and total worker compensation after inflation dropped by 5.5% in just the first quarter, accelerating a 10.9% drop in a year. Much worse was the collapse in economic productivity, now extended for three quarters and becoming very deep.
The Labor Department had to report that productivity fell 7.5% in the first quarter, the biggest such decline in the U.S. economy since 1947. Financial “analysts” knew there would be a drop, but had no inkling how large; their estimates had ranged from one-quarter to one-half of the real collapse.
Most Americans, as in last week’s Washington Post-ABC News poll, see recession collapse breaking over their lives already hit hard by pandemic and raging inflation, though the vast majority don’t grasp that a nuclear war is looming out of this storm created by NATO. In Europe, CEOs are giving the warning, as reported in CNBC’s article “‘We See a Big Recession in the Making’: Top CEOs Are Fearing the Worst in Europe.” The headline quote is from Stefan Hartung, CEO of the engineering giant Bosch. “At some point in time, it won’t be just a supply crisis, it will also be a demand crisis, and then for sure, we are in a deep recession,” Hartung said. CNN reported that Deutsche Bank economists, in an April 26 report entitled, “Why the Coming Recession Will Be Worse Than Expected,” said point-blank, “We will get a major recession”—supposedly “only” until mid-2024—and blamed it on the central banks’ hyperinflationary policy imploding. And the City of London’s The Economist on May 5: “The expectation is that in the next two years, America will be in recession.”
Sharp declines in economic productivity are across the board in the trans-Atlantic countries. The worst inflation, with food, fuel and shelter nearly doubling in price, is ripping through NATO members—the Baltic states, Turkey, the U.K., Poland—comparable to what their crazed sanctions war has imposed upon Russia. And developing countries, which are now also being forced to raise their interest rates so that the Federal Reserve does not collapse their currencies, face a disaster—foreshadowed in Afghanistan, Yemen, Haiti, Sri Lanka—in which their people will not be able to buy the food to survive.
The imperial monster that is “Global NATO” has feet of crumbling clay. The City of London- and Wall Street-centered megabanks are taking big losses, as reported here. They have been massively fortified with reserves from their central banks—to save them at our expense in such a collapse. It’s the economies, stupid, that are going down now.
This is the moment when the movement spreading out through Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s initiatives can move for Hamiltonian national banks in every nation to issue credit to raise economic productivity; multinational development banks; capital controls to protect national currencies; Glass-Steagall bankruptcy reorganization to protect productive investments from speculation. A new world development architecture, proposed for half a century by Lyndon LaRouche, now has the chance to support a new security architecture and stop NATO’s rush to world war.
