I don't make the rules about business cycles, I just live in them. This is the Bush Boom. The numbers prove it, and this is not good news short term, but it offers the Democrats an unparalleled chance long term.
Let's start from jobless claims. dropping rapidly. And the spot cost of oil climbing rapidly.
What does that spell - hiring plus commodity inflation? That's right, this is the boom. This is where employers are going to be as loose as they like with hiring, where they are going to be crawling all over each other to add positions. In otherwords, we've missed the soft-landing, as Greenback and Burnbanke have decided to say "what the hell, we can always slam on the Breaks after the Louisiana run-off."
The signs of massive fiscal stimulus are everywhere in the economy - which means that the allocated but not spent Iraq money - which adds up to over 20 billion dollars - is right now being released. Cheney admitted that we have tens of billions of dollars of spending authority that has not been used. And you can bet it is being used now to put lipstick on the pig that is the American economy.
Even as late as they have done it has flushed oil prices up - remember oil going up is a trailing, not leading indicator of this stimulus - and demand, both here and in the countries we buy from, spirals upwards. Now if we had a sensible monetary and fiscal regime, this would not have happened.
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