The American Media Is Not Properly Informing or Preparing Its Audience for the Next Economic Shift

 Am I talking about a recession? A depression? Mass unemployment? Rise in cost-of-living? More bank bailouts?

I'm talking about all of it. Or some of it. Or a combination. Something is coming, and Americans are not being properly prepped. This isn't about stoking fear; it's about being informed enough so that when something does happen, your actions are being governed by fear.

Let's start with this news from Business Insider, "The dollar falls behind the yuan for the first time in Chinese cross-border transactions":

For the first time ever, the yuan has eclipsed the US dollar as the most used currency for Chinese cross-border transactions.

The yuan's use in cross-border payments and receipts rose to 48.4% at the end of March while the dollar's share slid to 46.7%, according to a Reuters calculation of data from China's State Administration of Foreign Exchange.

In 2010, the yuan's share was nearly 0% while the dollar's was 83%, according to Bloomberg. The reversal comes amid China's efforts to empower the yuan, also known as the renminbi, in trade and capital markets.

Meanwhile, Chinese bonds have seen greater inflows recently, alongside outflow increases to Hong Kong stocks.

Increased reliance on the yuan will reduce any risks of currency mismatches. For this reason, China's State Council is encouraging expansions in the renminbi's use for cross-border transactions.

But the dollar remains dominant beyond China's borders. For example, the yuan's share of global currency transactions for trade finance was just 4.5% in March compared to 83.7% for the dollar, per Reuters.

Still, the yuan has continued to make inroads, especially since Western sanctions that froze Russia's foreign exchange reserves highlighted the potential risk of holding dollars. 

China has entered into non-dollar trade agreements with countries such as Brazil. And the yuan has overtaken the dollar as Russia's most traded currency since Moscow was largely cut off from global finance after its invasion of Ukraine last year.

But analysts say the dollar is unlikely to lose its dominance in global markets in the foreseeable future. That's as the yuan is too tightly controlled by the Chinese government.

Now, as an American new outlet, they had to add that the dollar is still "dominant" and that "the Chinese government controls the yuan too tightly" to soften the blow. But keep in mind that having your currency tightly controlled -aka, engaging in a form of economic planning- is not unique to China. In fact, economic planning itself is done by American companies. 

Currently, a search on NBC News, CNBC, and CNN show little about this story except the occasional "Digital Yuan? Weird!" or "Well, maybe the US dollar should watch out" story. Nothing about how the sanctions in Russia are hurting the US dollar. Nothing about the Global South looking for options besides the US dollar. 

Nevertheless, people are sensing that something is off. According to CNN, consumer confidence and faith in the job market are not looking good:

The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index, which measures attitudes toward the economy and the job market, fell to 101.3 in April, down from 104 in March and marking the lowest level since July 2022. The business group’s measure of economic expectations fell in April and has remained below a threshold “associated with a recession within the next year” for every month since February 2022, with the exception of an uptick in December.

Consumer attitudes have held steady since the turbulence in the banking industry last month, but high inflation and economic uncertainty have continued to weigh on consumers.

“Consumers became more pessimistic about the outlook for both business conditions and labor markets,” said Ataman Ozyildirim, senior director of economics at The Conference Board, in a statement accompanying the data. “Compared to last month, fewer households expect business conditions to improve and more expect worsening of conditions in the next six months. They also expect fewer jobs to be available over the short term.”

Call me crazy, but I think one reason people are "pessimistic" is because of all of the firings. Places like Disney, Lyft, Whole Foods, Walmart, McDonald's, Amazon, Indeed, NPR, Zoom, Boeing, Dell, The Washington Post, Microsoft, and Goldman Sachs and others have been firing employees since the beginning of the year (or plan to), and considering the industrial diversity of the companies involved, saying the phrase, "No one's job is safe" would not be an exaggeration. 

We're talking about a country where a majority of jobs are in the services sector and many of the companies in that sector are laying people off. The cost of living for the average American is a little over $38,000/yr; for a family of four it's a bit over $85,000/yr. The median household income of America by state shows that only four states (Washington, DC; Maryland; Massachusetts and New Jersey) could "thrive" in that situation, and those number were pre-pandemic (the average median household income was $65,712.00 in 2019, suggesting that the average American cannot keep up with the cost of living). Oh, and health care costs average to about $12,900 per person in America.

In other words: the majority of Americans barely have any money and they are at risk of losing their jobs; and the American Media isn't connecting the dots with what's going on globally, let alone the fact that the number of billionaires keep growing and growing and growing. 

For me, the bank bailouts that occurred during the George W. Bush presidency showed that the American media can't cover the economy without dragging electoral politics into the picture. Because their was no single person/party to blame, the cable shows and columnists were stuck twiddling their thumbs. Eventually, you had guests and hosts blaming poor people for taking loans instead of the rich people that treated Wall Street like a casino. And in the end, Democrats and Republicans came together -against the will of the working class- to bail out companies that were "too big to fail." Which was another way of saying that the larger you are and the more interconnected you are to the economy, the less likely you are to be punished for being reckless and immoral. 

I mean, who watches over the guy who plays the banker in Monopoly?

As I see history repeating itself in an more disturbing manner, it seems like the response is, "What guy?"