money This week in Trumponomics
Economists think the worst damage of the 2020 coronavirus recession has already occurred. But we’re nowhere near the end. President Trump insisted this week that “we are not closing our country” again if the virus resurges. Yahoo Finance's Rick Newman joins Jen Rogers to discuss and give this week's Trump-o-meter reading.
Video Transcript
JEN ROGERS: Time now for-- you know, if it's Friday, it is Trumponomics. So I don't know, Rick, he's been at nasty now, just to bring everybody up to speed?
RICK NEWMAN: Yeah. We had to create a new ranking on the Trumpometer called nasty, but it's not nasty this week. That was a couple of weeks ago, that terrible jobs report we got. So you know, a couple bullet points in the economy this week. We did get another round of initial unemployment claims and they're lower than before and the downtrend-- we've seen a steady downtrend for six weeks, Jen. Woohoo. Unemployment claims are going down.
Unfortunately, the latest number was still 12 times higher than the weekly number before the virus hit, and we're now up to, I think, 39 million lost jobs. And Trump said, you know, we're not gonna be shutting down the economy, even if there is a resurgence of the virus in the fall. OK, fine. The narrative from his economic advisors in the White House is, wow, we're gonna see an incredible recovery in the third and fourth quarter of this year.
So the incredible recovery is coming, it's just not here yet, and we're gonna be a long slog to get there. So the Trumpometer this week-- failing.
JEN ROGERS: All right. Moving up.
RICK NEWMAN: Second-worst readout. I don't know how it could be better than that when we've lost 39 million jobs and we just lost another 2.4 million. But if this miraculous recovery materializes in the fall, maybe we'll get back up to bigly.
JEN ROGERS: And Rick, we've talked about this before, but the reopening-- I mean, so far, knocking on wood, it seems to be going OK. And that will go into the Trumpometer, right? I mean, if it continues to look this way.
RICK NEWMAN: Yeah. And I guess there have been two surprises about the reopenings. First of all, we've not yet-- we should, you know, use that disclaimer-- seen the spike in virus infections that some of the public health experts say are likely and perhaps inevitable. Haven't seen it yet in places like Florida and Georgia. But also, people are not really going out very much. So there's not a big resurgence in business.
And it's becoming pretty clear that consumer confidence is a huge issue here. People don't necessarily think it's safe to go out, even with limited reopenings or when the governor says it's OK to go out. So we're just not seeing a big bounce back in restaurant business, or shopping, or other things like that. Confidence really matters here.
And I think by the middle of summer, we're going to realize the most important thing that public officials can do is give people legitimate reasons to feel more confident, not just tell them things are open.
JEN ROGERS: All right. Best part of the Friday, your Trumpometer score. You've got it now.
RICK NEWMAN: Your final Trumpometer, Jen.
JEN ROGERS: Yes. [INAUDIBLE]
RICK NEWMAN: Do I see you misting up a little?
JEN ROGERS: Not yet.
RICK NEWMAN: Nah.
JEN ROGERS: No. I'm OK. I'm good.
