Recent earnings from McDonald's, Kraft, and Coke confirm that Bidenomics is turning into a two-speed affair with plenty of wealth at the top and plenty of pain for the rest. Last week I joined Charles Payne, one of my favorite people at Fox, to talk about it. So McDonald's, Coke, Nestle, Starbucks, and Pepsi have all now flagged that low-income consumers are no longer able to absorb inflation. They are cutting back on visits and they are cutting back on spending, leading to a nationwide drop in traffic and sales across fast food and even basic groceries. McDonald's reported same-store sales or down 3% and transactions dropped 7%, outpacing 4% price likes to keep up with inflation. Pepsi reported a 5% drop in sales. Nestle dropped 8% for Hot Pockets, frozen pizzas, and Stouffer's frozen dinners. Kraft's Mac and Cheese, Pringles, and Pop-Tarts are all sagging. Starbucks is losing the low end altogether with its stock plunging 14% after turning in lower revenue transactions and ticket sizes while losing fully 1.5 million Loyalty Reward users. The CEO blamed "macro headwinds," meaning lower-end consumers squeezed by insulation and weak way growth. Headwind is quite the understatement in fact Nestle's Chief Financial Officer estimates the loss and purchasing power among low-income people since Biden took office has come to roughly 50%. It's a whole other reality on the high-end, where sales are doing fantastic. Most reported strong growth in pricier beers as "more consumers treat themselves more." More broadly, the luxury ETF LUXX which included brands like Hennessy, Hermes, and Ferrari is actually up 20% in the past 6 months as the wealthy gobble up their Balenciaga and let the poor eat TJ Maxx. In fact, just a few months ago, Lamborghini announced they sold 10,000 cars for the first time in history, a third of them in the US and mostly the Urus SUV that goes for $237,000; that's $269,000 for the performance model with the carbon ceramic brakes with subtle off-white coloring in a watermark Bentley also reported record sales recently with Aston Martin and Rolls-Royce close behind one analyst sums it up as a "K-shaped economy with very different realities for those at the top and those at the bottom, reflected in strong credit card spending at the top paired with soaring delinquency rates for the rest."
2:47. The rich will keep getting richer and everybody else will keep getting inflation because that's how the Fed works and it's how crony government spending works the FED's $6 trillion money printing orgy paired with the $8 trillion in deficit spending. Since the pandemic has flooded money to anybody who either already owned assets, so rich people above all, or who was lucky enough to work at a politically connected company or government contractor. As always, government money goes mostly to the powerful with an obligatory slab for vote buying at the bottom and nothing for the middle class. The solution, of course, is very easy: a dollar-first monetary policy, ideally ending the FED along with ending the deficit, so Americans are not forced to run just to stay on the treadmill.
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