Other people are feeling the pain, so says The Wall Street Journal:

The global economy — which had long remained resilient despite U.S. weakness — is now slowing significantly, with Europe offering the latest evidence of trouble.

On Thursday, the European Union’s statistics agency said gross domestic product in the euro zone contracted 0.2% in the second quarter, the equivalent of a 0.8% annual rate of decline. It marked the first time since the early 1990s that GDP has fallen overall in the 15 countries that use the euro.

In a fresh sign of the pressures facing the American economy, the Labor Department said Thursday that U.S. consumer-price inflation hit a 17-year high in July, rising 5.6% from a year earlier.

With the European growth report, four of the world’s five biggest economies — the U.S., the euro zone, Japan and the U.K. — are now flirting with recession.

China, the world’s fourth-largest economy, is still expanding strongly, as are India and other large developing economies. Still, weak growth elsewhere in the world is tempering the torrid rise in prices of commodities such as oil, copper and corn, giving relief to consumers from high gasoline and food costs and cutting manufacturers’ raw-materials bills. U.S. benchmark crude on Thursday closed at $115.01, down roughly 20% from its July 3 peak of $145.29 a barrel. Easing inflation pressures could also make it easier for the world’s central banks to lower rates in an attempt to fan flagging growth.

The global weakness marks a sharp reversal of expectations for many corporations and investors, who at the year’s outset had predicted that major economies would remain largely insulated from America’s woes.

 

 

   No word in the Journal whether CEOs are taking a hit i.e., suffering a slow-down in their compensation packages…

   To reiterate what I’ve said before: the slowdown is measured in statistics that don’t capture the full crushing weight that has been born by workers in this country, and elsewhere, for a lot longer than this current slowdown.

   And, there is an irony here. Oil prices are driving part of the economic problem. Oil prices SHOULD be higher, if we want to save the planet. We’ve lived, in tbis country, way too long with subsidized, cheap energy that allowed the dumb auto companies to keep putting SUVs on the road, among other things. But, the people bearing the price of the high oil prices are not the CEOs an certainly not the likes of Exxon (which keeps posting record profits) but the average person who has no buffer against the mistakes made by the bozos who have mismanaged the economy for so many years.