Financial FAQs
“The conflict with Iran has already put fresh stress on the U.S. economy, as businesses are reporting rising prices, fewer orders and a decline in employment. A survey of service-oriented companies — the sector that employs most Americans — fell to an 11-month low of 51.1 in March from 51.7 in the prior month, S&P Global said Tuesday.” MarketWatch
Maybe we shouldn’t be looking at the 1970’s era of stagflation for the kind of economic damage from the Iran War and closing of the Strait of Hormuz to oil shipments. There is a short-term spike in oil prices, though oil from other sources than the Gulf can eventually make up the difference in supplies.
The war’s damage may take longer to materialize but look more like the Great Recession, which we shouldn’t forget was a worldwide recession that occurred in 2008-09, the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
We shouldn’t forget that the Great Recession the Bush/Cheney administration and their oil barons ultimately spawned with the ill-planned invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan was based on lies about the weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein didn’t have.
And now Trump and his Robber Barons are taking the Gilded Age dreams of William Mckinley one step further with lies that Iran is preparing nuclear weapons to justify the ill-prepared war with Iran while alienating the allies that would help them succeed.
This is even though Trump’s just-resigned Counterterrorism czar Joe Kent said Iran posed no imminent threat with nuclear weapons.
The Great Recession was caused by more than the Bush wars on terror, of course. It was caused by putting too many regulation-cutting foxes in the Bush/Cheney hen house that literally resulted in the failure of nonbank banks like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers.
Trump is following the same playbook by gutting the government’s regulatory agencies that could prevent the blatant fraud occurring with the Trump administration’s Bitcoin investments that have no regulations or backing with assets.
This time negative GDP growth could come from the faltering labor market, which is frozen in place with almost no net new job creation at all in 2015 as highlighted in the above FRED graph. Fed Chair Powell remarked at his latest press conference that they were torn over whether to cut interest rates or raise them because Trump’s immigrant deportations were causing a labor shortage.
Economic growth ground to a halt as well in 2008, even when Fed Chair Greenspan anxiously began to cut interest rates to prevent the near failure of our banking system.
Powell’s Fed Governors also predicted overall GDP growth of 2.4 percent in 2026, even though Q4 2025 Real GDP growth slowed from 1.4 to just 0.7 percent. So I don’t understand the Fed’s optimism over economic growth.
And history has shown that no job growth will ultimately lead to no economic growth,
The frightening truth is that both Republican administrations have made bad decisions for the same wrong reasons.
Harlan Green © 2026
Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen
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