Bob Barney: The Real Inflation Numbers and The Lies We are Being Told (Transcript)

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO BOB BARNEY’S MIDDAY BROADCAST: Bob Barney: The Real Inflation Numbers and The Lies We are being told

Hello, Bob Barney again with Plain Truth Today, and we’ve been talking in the last few weeks, last few months about the effects of the tariffs, if there’s going to be an effect of tariffs, and of course, that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. When people get on TV and they say that there’s not going to be an inflation when you have a 15, 20, 25% tariff or a 100% tariff on this country or maybe a 50% on this country, I mean, I just don’t understand these experts. And I have said over and over and over again, don’t believe people that are snake oil salesmen on these business shows or reporters in general, because they want you to keep buying stock.

They want you to think everything’s great because they make money off this kind of stuff. But the thing is, if you are in business, or you have your mind to look at the real news, and have a brain to realize that anything that makes the price of business go up, cost money to somebody. There’s not enough money for companies to keep absorbing tariffs. And even if that’s the case, you’re taking that money away from the stockholders who are mainly American. None of this makes sense. This is bad business news.This is bad business ideas. This is not sound capitalism. And I mean real capitalism. I’m not talking about corporatism, where we give big companies and monopolies welfare with government tax breaks. I’m talking about 60% of the businesses in America are small businesses. And they really compete against each other and they have very slim margins.So what I wanted to play today, because I think it’s kind of unique, is I keep saying in these shows, look at the numbers, look down into the records, and see what is else going on that maybe just maybe is telling you that everything is not going great like the Trump administration and everyone else on TV is trying to tell you right now. I’m going to play a few, like I did the other day, I’m going to play a few outtakes from different programs that, you know, doesn’t make the morning program when all the people watch before they go to work. This was during the day I caught it.

I backed it up and I taped it so we can play it and talk about it. But listen to some of the real numbers about tariffs and stuff that’s being said. This is again from Squawk Box at the nine o’clock hour, or yeah, no, I’m sorry, it was like quarter to nine the other day. Yesterday’s headline, just modestly higher inflation from tariffs. Steve’s going to dig deeper into that. I just want to have a conversation with you before you. He wrote something out, been crunching some numbers. You can do that in a second. Can I read something? This is what we were trying to say yesterday, and I think that’s good. Then I want to ask you what it would really take. For the Fed, the lack of a more alarming acceleration in price pressures likely removes an obstacle to lowering rates in response to worries about the labor market. This is Joe Kernan. He’s so far up Trump’s butt when it comes to promoting that these tariffs don’t cause an increase in cost of goods sold. Also, he believes the economy is great. He believes that everybody is doing really well except people who are lazy. That’s basically his, if you listen to him long enough, and I like Joe Kernan. I listened to him for many years now, but this is his take because these people are so far away from the reality of the middle-class Americans because they’re being paid millions of dollars a year. They have no concept of what it is to be struggling from paycheck to paycheck.

I can guarantee you right now that middle-stream, mainstream America is not doing great right now, like Donald Trump says or he wants to say. You’re going to hear some statistics now that you’re basically not hearing. This sums up what I think we saw yesterday. The 3.1 was hotter. The 2.7 was lower. Talking about inflation. What would be the sour number for 3.5? I think it’s kind of like there’s been two criteria, Joe. How much is coming through and is it bleeding into other areas? Those have been the keys. You’re expecting 3.5? It’s not out of the question. Guys, let’s just skip the first part of this and go right to the first question. These are things, Joe, what we did is we calculated prices changes from January to July. Women’s dress is up 10.4%. Tools and hardware, it’s just 4.8. I’m sorry, that broke up.4.8 for tools and hardware. We’re talking about six months worth of inflation. Women’s clothes up 10%.

Tools and hardware up 5%. You see toys and games. These are things that normally would be going down or flat or were offsets to it.And that’s really a key. Guys, if you move on here, we’re doing this live here. Another way to see the change, though, is from the prior declining trend.Mike Konzel from the Roosevelt Institute found some stark reversals. Take a look here. Tools and appliance categories was heading down.That’s the trend line, the dotted line there before the reversal that likely is linked to tariffs. Similar pattern in home furnishings and dozens of other products that are mostly imported. The trend line was down and you can see the current line is up.Konzel found that 52% of 82 items in the core basket are up more than 3%. That was a sign of persistent inflation in the pandemic. Scott Lincecum from the Cando Institute tells me, quote, the big question is whether we’re starting to see it move into the service. Inflation and auto repair could be a sign of that. How long margins could hold before they pass on the tariff? At the same time, talking about what Joe was talking about, those who see benign tariff outcomes have been proven correct in several respects. Some prices are falling, perhaps in reaction to other things being more expensive. That’s that relative price that we’ve been talking about acting as an offset to the tariffs. And tariffs may not be sufficient in and of themselves to overcome these other offsets. Take a look at yesterday’s CPI.

Energy was down 1.1, so that’s a big offset. Food at home, down 0.1. Core commodities, though, were up. That’s where it really was modest. But the surprise was that core services up 0.4. So the stock market trades like it’s game over in this debate between saying it isn’t gonna ever happen and then it’s warning just you wait. But the latter see overtime to this game in August and the inflation reports. I think that answers your question. We talked about it earlier. You know, the consensus has gone from, oh, it’s gonna be terrible inflation to now people think that we know that it’s not good. Can I ask you one question? And that’s just simply not the case. We do not know yet how bad inflation is going to be and stagflation. Now, inflation will lower itself somewhat if we go into a recession, which I really think we’re already in a recession. The GDP doesn’t prove that. It did the first quarter of the year. It was negative, but the last quarter was quite well positive, they claim. But I think that has more to do with big business reporting than it has to do with the little guy in the street.

But anyway, we’ll have to see that. But my point is, even if we go into a recession, as long as you keep tariffs, and there are so many things we just do not manufacture in America, as long as you keep tariffs, you’re going to continue having a high price, even in a recession. Usually in a recession, I want to just explain this to people who may not know this, prices come down, called deflation, because companies are saddled with a lot of products, and they’re selling them off, even at a loss, to get cash, because they need cash to keep going, or they got to start laying off people and they have to start shrinking their company. But if there is what’s called stagflation, which we had in the 1970s, and we thought we were going to have with Joe Biden, but we did not, we did not. We had bad inflation, but it did have what was called a demand destruction of the economy, and the economy slowed down to a recession. And the last two years, in my opinion, the last two years of the Biden administration was a pure United States, America, and worldwide depression, recession, however you want to, you want to say it. You know, Ronald Reagan said a depression is when you’re out of work, and a recession when your neighbor’s out of work, very little difference. But the idea that these tariffs, this kind of tariffs have not been tried since the 1930s, and all one has to do is go back to the 1930s and find out just how bad that happened to be, because it caused World War II. This is the perfect world that I wish, I wish there was some chance that it was true.

What’s that? You know how Trump always says that we’re collecting money from foreign countries, and we already know that it’s people that imported here. No, no, but my question is, let’s say that there are countries that it’s so important that they continue to export to us, that they really have eaten the lion’s share of the tariffs in their prices. So you actually could say that they’re the ones that are losing out and actually paying for the tariff money. At least a part of that could be true, it could be 10%, it could be 50%. Golden Sack says it’s 60%. That was also including the wholesalers and the retailers and corporations. Meaning American corporations. Wouldn’t it be great? It would be great. What a wonderful world it would be. I want to give you two answers to that question. The first one is why I like my job so much, because you know what now is not only PPI, I think it’s tomorrow, we’re going to get import prices. When did you ever get excited about import prices? I’m excited about it because the import prices will answer that question. If import prices are not falling, they were kind of flat. Which is crazy. It shows that they’re not absorbing it overseas. But the dollar’s been weak too. You have a currency. The other thing is, you know we have our CFO council, which is really a great group of people.

What he’s going to say here, I’m breaking in here because this is a very important thing, is what I talked about the other day, is there is not the profit margin in business today to absorb tariffs at big amounts. People think, and people who are not owners of businesses or they’re just consumers, they think that these big businesses work on two, three, four hundred percent like the pharmaceuticals do. But most companies are not pharmaceuticals. There’s a reason why Walmart, for example, has put everybody out of business in a small town. All the mom and pops, they cannot compete because Walmart buys so good and sells so low that just you and I, if we tried to compete against Walmart, we’d go out of business. So therefore, if they are being able to buy that cheap and that low and sell to you that low, they’re doing so on a very reduced profit. Relying on billions of dollars in sales at a low profit still means billions of dollars of profit, but it’s not a lot percentage. But listen to this next thing that this guy, Steve, points out. And I think it’s what I’ve been saying, but you’re not hearing this from the media you’re listening to. One CFO said to me, I don’t think we’re that stupid and bad negotiators that our suppliers have 15 percent extra margin to absorb. And that is the case. Nobody is making that kind of profit in a commodity world. The people in my business, the people who are making the resins, the people who are making the solvents, they’re not making a great deal of money. Now, when you get to the automotive paint, the end people, the big five out there, which has a 99 percent market share worldwide because they are a monopoly. They’re the ones that are 40, 50, 60 times in their cost, but not the raw materials that they’re selling to them from basically China.

Almost all resins and paint additives come from China today because no American company wants to be in that business with an EPA that’s going to go after them and target them. But let’s go on and finish this and we’re going to get one other thing that’s going to show you the real state of our economy. Exactly.Businesses like our business, my wife and my business, we do not have the room to absorb these tariffs. And the idea that when Donald Trump said to places like Walmart or Ford, live with it, absorb it, don’t pass it on to the consumer, make less money. Well, he’s not making less money.Let’s go on. Every single well, every single producer is not making it. He thinks every single person’s got every chance they get.So you can use it. Well, you got an ex you already making money and you have an extra 15 percent. I couldn’t negotiate it out.And that the world is so uncompetitive that there’s an extra 15 percent hanging around. What’s in videos for me? Well, that’s the margin. But that’s true.That’s true. And we’ll see. We’ll take it from margin.My friend Rob is begging me to not talk. As I pointed out, NVIDIA is just going to pass that 15 percent on to the rest of the American businesses that need to buy that same chip. That’s what’s going to happen with NVIDIA and AMD.China’s not going to pay that 15 percent. NVIDIA eventually is not going to pay that 15 percent, nor is AMD. Who’s going to end up paying it? Is you, me and the consumer in America? Who pays for the whole world? It seems like.And Donald Trump has not changed that projection one bit. Now, the next topic that I’m going to cover today to show you how bad the economy is and what tariffs are doing to the small businesses of America and even some mid-sized businesses and the big guys can overcome a lot of this, but the little guys cannot. And this is another report.This is not CNBC. It’s Bloomberg News. And it’s about bankruptcies.

I’m going to go talk about that right after this message from theplaintruth.com. Please go to theplaintruth.com every day to find out what’s happening, what it means to you, and what God may have to say about it. That’s theplaintruth.com where you can go to the Message Board and leave your ideas. You don’t have to register to do so. You can go to our Your Health Today and learn about what maybe you should do to improve your health. And you can go, of course, to these podcasts and find out what I have to say about things and other people, because we broadcast a lot of different points of view to try to keep our listeners and our readers informed. That’s theplaintruth.com. Please go there every day.

Thank you. Well, we’re back now, and I want to go into the last deal to show you how bad our economy really is doing and things you just are not listening to when you watch the local news or the six o’clock news or even, unfortunately, the business news. And I got this from Bloomberg .I’m going to try to get it. I might be a little off here. If so, I’ll try to.But I’m just going to show you something here based on bankruptcies, corporate bankruptcies in the United States. Could result in less transparency around the Fed rate decision, which would increase uncertainty for investors and companies, something the market never likes. And some argue that’s a worse case scenario than the data itself of being wrong, especially now for a growing number of companies critically in need of that transparency. You’ve got U.S. corporate bankruptcies in July, which is your highest monthly volume since 2020. You’re talking about large public and private companies filing bankruptcy at a rate of 71 last month and then 66 in June. Year-to-date total filings run about 446 through the end of July. That is the most for the seven month period since 2010. So a record of 15 years. And this is a really tricky problem. A record bankruptcy in 15 years, 2010. That’s when the Tea Party movement started because Obama was destroying our economy. I went through it again with our business and we darn near went out of business under Obama.

He destroyed our economy in many ways worse than Joe Biden did. Because when you look at the facts, Joe Biden, maybe he was senile. Maybe he didn’t know what he was doing.Of course, he didn’t know what he was doing anyway. He’s a Democrat. But the truth is, bankruptcies weren’t where they are right now.Corporate bankruptcies were lower under Biden than they are now. They were under lower under the first Trump than they are now. We have to go back to 2010, 15 years to get to the number of bankruptcies that we’ve had so far in the first seven months of this year.When you listen to these experts saying, we don’t have a problem. The United States is booming. We’re leading the world.It’s a lie. It’s an absolute lie. You go to the Bible.I’m going to say something before we end this bankruptcy thing here. You go to the Bible and you read the prophets and the prophets talking about the lying prophets, the false prophets that continually lie in the name of the Lord. God has a problem with it because people say, thus saith the Lord when they did not.Jeremiah, a true prophet of God had a lot of problems when he gave prophecies because he was given prophecies that God told him to give to the people of Judah. They did not want to hear. And so there were these false prophets, you know, like the so-called Christian ministers of today that are really into bell worship, into paganism.And they’re not telling you the truth. I watched a program the other day on a side note where this, it was like a commercial, but it was a lie. This evangelical pastor type was saying how young people in droves are coming to Christ.

It’s probably the biggest revival in the last 75 to 100 years. It’s nonsense. Read the polls.Young people today are more apt to reject modern Christianity, even modern Christianity, but real Christianity than any people before them. Worldwide, Christianity is suffering. Now, I’m not saying that God’s not going to bring it back when the time comes right, but you have this guy on TV, I thought it was a paid commercial on a news show, saying, oh, kids everywhere, and I showed these pictures of these kids with their arms waving in the air, you know, because they’re controlled by Satan when they do that, by the way.That’s all part of false Christianity. And they show all these kids swaying back and forth, thousands of kids. It’s like everybody you know, every kid that you know, your neighbor’s kids, your best friend’s kids, they’re all, you know, going to these Christian socials.Really? Do you see that? This is the lies that our media continues to bring to us. Lie upon lie upon lie. Go to the Bible and read for yourself what God has to say about the lying prophets.This is from Jeremiah, and I believe, yeah, it’s 23, chapter 23, and he’s got a message to the prophets, and he says, my heart is broken, all my bones shake, I’m like a drunk person, like someone who’s overcome with wine. This is because the Lord and his holy words are affecting me, is what he’s saying. The land of Judah, and that’s what it’s really called, it should not be called Israel today, the Jews, wherever the Jews live is called Judah, wherever Ephraim lives should be called Israel.

The land of Judah is full of people who are guilty of adultery. Is the United States not full of people guilty of adultery? Because of this, the Lord has cursed the land. It’s become a very sad place, and the pastors have dried up.The people are all evil, and they use their power in the wrong way. Does that not sound like what’s happening today? But listen to the next phrase here that’s coming on. Both the prophets and the priests live as there is no God.I found them doing evil things, even in my own temple, says the Lord. So they will be in danger, they will be forced into darkness, there they will be defeated, I will bring disaster on them, in the year I punish them. I saw the prophets, says the Lord, do something wrong.Those prophets prophesize by the word of Baal, Baal worship, false Christianity, and led my people of Israel astray. Israel is the United States of America, and England, and the Lost Ten Tribes throughout Europe. I’ve also seen the prophets of Jerusalem do terrible things.They themselves are guilty of adultery, and they live by lies, and they encourage evil people to keep on doing evil things so people don’t ever stop sinning. All of those people are like the city of Sodom, the people of Jerusalem are like the people of Gomorrah to me, sayeth the Lord. So this is what the Lord all-powerful says he’s going to do to these prophets, and this is what’s going to happen to these false Christian ministers.

.Do not be deceived, God will not be mocked, God will fulfill his promises. I will make those prophets eat bitter food and drink poisoned water because the prophets of Jerusalem spread wickedness throughout the whole country. Don’t pay attention to what these prophets are saying to you.They’re trying to fool you. They talk about visions that they make up in their own mind. They’re not from me.They say those who hate me, the Lord says you have peace. You know, I have, you keep hearing we got peace, we’re gonna have peace, right? They say all these stubborn things because they want to tell you what you want to hear, that nothing will bad will happen to you, but none of these prophets has stood in the meetings of the angels or seen my message or heard it at any time. Look, the punishment from the Lord is coming like a storm.His anger will be like a hurricane. It will come swirling down on the heads of these wicked people called my prophets who are liars. The Lord’s anger will not stop until he finishes and does what he plans to do, and when that day is over, you will understand this prophecy clearly.I did not send these prophets, but they tell people what they themselves make up in their own mind. That is the problem that we have with these false prophets that’s trying to tell you all’s good, everything’s great, the economy’s okay, yeah, we have tariffs, but it ain’t gonna make a difference. Doesn’t make a difference that your company that you’re buying from has got to pay 50% more for the same product they did last year, but they’re not going to pass that off to you because they’re making such good money.

No, no, the country that it’s coming from is going to underwrite the whole thing. This is lying prophets, the lying prophets of business, lying prophets of religion, you name it. Let’s go on to this bankruptcy thing here now.To solve on one hand, you know, if you want to correct this data, it’s in pause, you’re looking at less transparency, but on the other hand, the data does need to be corrected because many businesses make decisions off of this, and some would argue, had the data been correct in May and in June, we would have had a rate cut already, and some of those businesses on the brink of bankruptcy. Some of those businesses would not have, on the brink of collapse, would not have collapsed. What she said here is what I’ve been just saying.If the truth was told to many of these businesses that the economy is suffering, tariffs are hurting us, other businesses are going bankrupt, news that you’re not hearing, that other businesses are not hearing, and so when they’re having bad records, they’re blaming themselves, saying everybody else is doing great, listen to the news, everybody’s doing great, this is the best economy, according to the president of all times, and he did a good job the first time around, what are we doing wrong? And they try to change things, and they try to correct their losses, and what they do is they dig themselves into a grave even deeper when you try to cut to make a profit. When businesses try to cut to make a profit, they cut themselves out of business, and that is what’s happening, and that’s why bankruptcies are running at a 15-year high, and I even think they’re going to get a lot worse in the coming year when the tariffs finally hit, but then there’s one other thing that’s going to hit our economy, and pricing, and inflation, and that is when the crops in California, Arizona, Florida, continually will not be picked, because the people picking them are hiding from the ICE agents, and so crops, and I have a customer who told me he paints farm equipment out in California, as far as you can see, he was seeing produce rotting in the field, and the people who run the farm say nobody’s coming to work because they’re all afraid to. This is all going to come and bite us in the butt, and we have a problem coming, and keeping our heads buried under the sand, listening to all good news, that’s what the people of Israel did, that’s what the people of Judah did, and it didn’t do them any well, any good, and it’s not going to do us any good to listen to false lies from false prophets.

God is not going to be mocked. God tells us how we should treat one another, which we’re not doing, and how we should live in a lawful manner. You know, I get a laugh out of people saying what I’m talking about, I’m preaching legalism.What’s wrong with that? Do you want illegalism in your life? When you buy a house, do you want to have a deed that’s legal, or do you want somebody to just write something on a piece of paper? It’s yours, and then two months later, you find out the person didn’t even own it, because you didn’t make it legal by registering it with the courthouse, and by having loan insurance, you know, business insurance, or this insurance. Everybody in their personal life, anybody with brains, they want to be legal, but for some reason, when you say God wants you to follow the legality of his laws, then you say, oh, that’s legalism, and Jesus did away with it. He did no such thing, not a word of truth in that.That’s lying prophets, lying to you to tell you what you want to hear, so you can continue to eat pork, you can continue to go to church on Sunday, you can continue to have an affair with your neighbor’s wife because you’re going to go repent of it. All of these things are leading America down the drain to ruin, and the person behind it, or I should say the God that is behind it, is the God they think they’re worshiping, because God is not going to continue to allow America to keep going the way it is with leaders that are crooks, leaders who truly do not believe in any God. They just tell you they do, so you think that they’re good people, and you yourselves are going to have to come to the conclusion, at least for you and your family, if not a country, to go to God, start following what God says to do, read the Bible, and understand the Bible is news, it’s not a religion, it’s not a book of what you should do, it is the news God is giving to you, the plain truth news of what’s going to happen, and why it’s going to happen, and what you can do to stop it from happening, and until you understand that is good news, the gospel is the news of the day, that’s the most important news you will ever hear.

Now who won, you know, the baseball game, or you know, who won the race? No, the news you want to hear is the news you find in the Bible, because it’s what’s going to affect you, your family, and your future. Well, we’re about out of time, I just wanted to get this off about the inflation, and the lack thereof, and it’s really higher than anybody can imagine. You know, one last point, and I’m going to go a little over time. We have a three percent inflation, we should have a two percent deflation, because people forget we’re at that high level that Biden left us, with a 40 percent inflation mark, and now we’re still going up three percent a year on top of that. We should be going down, in good times or not. If these policies were good, prices fall, prices should be falling, because they were at an artificially inflated high. No, that’s not what we’re seeing. So when they say it’s a three percent inflation, and if inflation should be going down called deflation, by 3 to 4 percent a year which would be good for businesses and consumers, if that is the case we are really running at a 7 percent inflation rate, am I right?

We are out of time, I gotta go, thank you for listening to The Plain Truth Today, this is Bob Barney, bye bye.