Global Macro Monitor

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DAWN BANCROFT, a 59-year-old gym owner from Pennsylvania, travelled to the national capital a year ago this week to hear Donald Trump speak, not to commit terrorism. Yet as she marched up Constitution Avenue, with the former president’s instruction to “fight like hell” ringing in her ears, Ms Bancroft apparently mislaid her moral compass.

Forcing a way through the mob outside the Capitol building, she and her friend Diana came to a shattered window and clambered through it. “We got inside, we did our part,” Ms Bancroft later explained in a video message to her children. “We were looking for Nancy to shoot her in the friggin’ brain. But we didn’t find her.”

After hearing the women plead guilty to a misdemeanour last September, Judge Emmet Sullivan wondered “how good people who never got into trouble with the law morphed into terrorists”. 

… Most made no effort to hide their identities. A Texan estate agent plugged her company while live-streaming the attack; an Ohioan kicked in a window of the Capitol wearing a jacket bearing the name and phone number of his decorating firm. The riot, as the biggest prosecutorial effort in American history has already made clear, was the logical expression of Mr Trump’s big lie, proudly carried out by 2,000 of his devoted supporters. To repudiate the violence, Republicans had no alternative but to repudiate the lie. Having failed to do so, they are instead normalising it. – The Economist

How Close Is The US To Civil War? Closer Than You Think

Wow!  The data say the U.S. no longer qualifies as a democracy.  Check out the video. 

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We have updated our tables of the IMF’s forecast and estimates of GDP growth rates for the G20 and the rest of the world for 2022 and 2021.  The post has always been a favorite for our readers.  The 2022 forecast ranks the world’s fastest to slowest growing economies in the ginormous table below. 

The data are from the October 2021 IMF’s World Economic Outlook so are a bit stale and do not reflect the new COVID variants but are close enough for government work and snapshot of the coming year. 

We have also added a chart of world GDP growth to illustrate how disruptive the COVID shock was.  Some advanced economies are now overheating from too much stimulus, including the U.S., and will need to adjust fiscal and/or monetary policy.  It’s is very difficult to forecast during the pandemic.  

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Excellent video and preview of 2022 from The Economist.  Worth your time.

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Great chart from the Economist on how nations are faring during the pandemic using a multiple of indicators.  Those damn Nordic socialist countries are kicking our arse!

The pandemic has created winners and losers—and the dispersion between them is likely to persist in 2022.

In order to assess these differences, The Economist has gathered data on five economic and financial indicators—GDP, household incomes, stockmarket performance, capital spending and government indebtedness—for 23 rich countries. We have ranked each economy according to how well they have performed on each indicator, creating an overall league table (the chart shows the ranking and four of our five indicators). Some countries remain in the economic pits, while others are faring better than they were before the pandemic on almost every measure. Denmark, Norway and Sweden are all near the top, and the American economy has also performed reasonably well. Many big European countries, however, including Britain, Germany and Italy, have fared worse. Spain has done worst of all. – Economist

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According to Exante Data , creator of the following chart, U.S passengers now screened by the TSA is back to 83 percent of the 2019 levels. Getting there but not home yet.

I dropped my daughter and her significant other at SFO on Christmas Day to fly to London. At the same time, a good friend, known as Harry The K. on this site, flew back from Heathrow and is sick with THE symptoms but is yet to be tested. Godspeed, HTK.

Let’s take every precaution, throw off the fear and get back to normal. Don’t live like what King Solomon described as those who were afraid to get out of bed because “there are lions roaming the public square.”

May science and the miracle of modern medicine coupled with our unselfish and empathetic behavior kick COVID’s ass in 2022. Let’s do this, folks!

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Hope everyone is enjoying the Holidays.

This is a great video worth a few minutes of your time, especially the FOMO crowd.

Look for big changes coming to GMM in the next year.

Happy New Year! A healthy and prosperous one.

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