Joe Biden's media supporters keep assuring us that things are getting better with the economy.  However, Jim Hoft, founder of Gateway Pundit, wrote on New Year's Day of the reality: we are in a recession.  Stop drinking the "we're OK" Kool-Aid. 

Biden, with help from the Federal Reserve and Congress, wiped out $10 trillion in American wealth in 2022.  This is record-breaking destruction.

Steve Bannon at War Room rolled out a Financial Times chart from earlier in the week showing what an outlier 2022 was when compared to prior years.

Steve Bannon War Room screen grab.

The U.S. should be in the right upper quadrant of the chart, but 2022 put the U.S. in the left lower quadrant.  The 2022 situation doesn't even factor in the effect of the $1.7-trillion omnibus spending bill.  The data point on the chart reflects the value of assets in stocks and bonds, with no effort to measure other assets like real estate.  It might be worse if other economic measures are considered. 

Just the other day, the St. Louis Federal Reserve Branch, relying on multiple indicators, declared that we have a recession.  This information is no surprise, but it raises questions about what's happening at the rest of the Fed's branches.

Image: Economic crisis (edited) by Sky and Glass.

In the real world, loss of asset value is a measure of prosperity or recession.  While we once asked whether we could trust public health authorities (the answer is "no," in case you were wondering), this year's question is whether you can trust the financial "authorities" when they talk about mild recessions and point to job numbers that are buffed up by double-counting people with more than one job, even as they ignore that workforce participation has declined.  The workforce participation number is down because of the economy and because people are living on government handouts.

Only the impaired and dysfunctional would not be aware of the economic downturn — people with no connection to the economy and no savings who don't even shop for food or buy goods and services, don't have a car, and don't travel.  No wonder Americans are walking around wondering what happened to their net worth.

A country in decline usually suffers from self-inflicted wounds, and those wounds may be severe, even fatal.