RUSH: The stock market, the Drive-By Media gleefully…I have never seen them so happy, other than on election night. They’re happy the stock market’s bottoming out! They are ecstatic. These people can’t help themselves! They’re gleefully reporting the stock market’s dropped another 400 points yesterday and will probably drop another 400 today, and all of the gains that have been made this year have been wiped out with the stock market decline over the past series of weeks — and especially tech stocks.
The tech stocks are taking a huge hit, and the Drive-Bys have mixed emotions on that, because the tech stocks, the FANG stocks… That would be Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google –and if you throw Apple in there, then it’s the FAANG stocks. Apple is excluded because they really don’t have much to do with social media, per se. Like Google is the search engine. Apple is a design company that sells innovation in hardware and software. They’re not really a social media outfit, per se.
In fact, every time they’ve been trying to be one they have bombed royally. They just don’t seem to be able to do it, which is neither here nor there. But Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google are having the bottom fall out while Trump’s approval numbers on the economy have gone way up. Gallup reported yesterday that “53% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the economy. That’s up three points from their poll conducted back in August.”
Gallup says, “This mark’s Trump’s best approval rating on the economy ever,” and note that it comes after the election.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now, back to the stock market for a minute, because this is also par for the course. None of the articles on the autumn swoon of the stock market are blaming Democrats. They’re blaming capitalism in general. They’re not even really trying to blame tech. I mean, Facebook is in the crosshairs right now because Facebook… You want to know what this is really all about with Facebook?
That big New York Times hit piece on Friday. It’s really about the fact that the rest of the tech and leftist crowd don’t think Zuckerberg worked hard enough to stop Trump in 2016. That’s really what it boils down to. When they say that Zuckerberg didn’t do enough to stop Russian meddling, there wasn’t any Russian meddling, and there wasn’t any Russian tampering with votes. I swear, that hoax…
I mentioned yesterday, 42% of the American people — and, by the way, this is not a weird outlier poll. This was The Economist/YouGov. A combination of their polling units here found that 42% of the American people not just believe in collusion, but that the Russians actually tampered with ballots. This is one of the biggest political hoaxes that has ever succeeded to this extent, that 42% of the American people believe when they hear the word “collusion” that Russians actually got in there and tampered with votes and vote counts.
I don’t know how you fight that. All of conservative media has been, for a period of two years, dispelling the myth of this collusion story, and yet 42% of the American people believe it. It’s traceable back to our having lost the education institution some generations ago. So the swoon of the stock market, Facebook there, and the media’s okay with that. The Facebook plunge, the media’s okay with that because Zuckerberg didn’t do enough to stop Trump in 2016. It’s not that Zuckerberg didn’t get rid of the Russians.
There weren’t any Russians on Facebook until after the election, per se. It’s that Zuckerberg didn’t use the powers that he had to stop Trump in the first place. But I think, you look at the stock market — and we’ve got historical precedent for this. The media has been predicting a blue wave since last December. The media has been predicting the Democrat Party’s gonna takeover Congress. It was gonna be takeover the Senate. The Democrat Party was gonna get rid of Donald Trump. The Democrat Party was gonna erase all vestiges of any opposition.
So here we come with Election Day, and they win the House, and I don’t think it’s odd at all that the stock market starts going south with the prospect of Democrats having more power in Washington, and of course there isn’t an article or a discussion on cable news that will ever make this point. The Democrats, the left will never be blamed for anything that goes wrong in the economy. They will only be praised.
Even Obama sitting there over economic growth of 1.5% was praised for having the guts to tell the American people that the salad days were over and that there was a new reality where you weren’t gonna be able to have much of anything you wanted because you never deserved to have it in the past anyway. America was never that great, never that exceptional, and it’s not now, and get used to it — and Obama was praised for being honest with the American people.
Yet the minute Obama was gone, look at what began to happen in the stock market and the economy in general. All during the campaign, we were told, “The stock market loves divided government. The stock market loves gridlock. The stock market loves Washington being paralyzed because that means fewer regulations on the financial industry.” Of course they said just the opposite during the Obama years, when the bad economy was blamed on the divided government and gridlock, not on Obama.
But I think investors are right to have some fear right now. Look what happened. When the Democrats lost control of the House the last time, back in 2006, they were only too willing to start talking us into a recession in order to try to win the White House. Look what they did in 2004 through 2008. You remember those years? Everybody thinks in those years that it was the media beating up and the Democrats beating up on Bush for the Iraq war, and it was.
But they spent four solid years talking down the U.S. economy, four solid years trying to convince the American people that the economy was stagnant and falling and in a recession. It took ’em four years to get Bush’s approval numbers down into the low thirties. But they did it, and they convinced everybody that the economy was in a quagmire. I remember having people call here (impression), “Hey, Rush, I’m not feeling too good. I’m really doing well.
“My life, economically, is great. I turn the news and I see everybody else is suffering and (stammering) I’m kind of afraid to, you know, live here the way I can because I’m seeing that so many people are destitute and on the downside.” It wasn’t the case. It was just the news media making it up in an effort to get Democrats elected, which is what is beginning to happen now. It worked. Given the Democrats’ practice of repeating what has worked in the past, why shouldn’t we expect them to try it again?
Now, yesterday’s nosedive was led by the tech stocks — Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google — and I might add that all of those outfits are run by Democrat activists, and they are all wealthy beyond your ability to comprehend. These are the CEO and high execs at Apple and the Google guys (Sergey Brin and Larry Page) and their top aides and lieutenants. It’s the same thing at Netflix and Amazon. These people are rolling in more wealth than they know what to do it, and I wouldn’t put it past them to tank things for a couple of years if that’s what they think it takes to defeat Trump in 2020.
I would not be surprised about that at all, because there’s a history for this kind of behavior. It’s almost like the Federal Reserve raising interest rates! For no reason whatever whatsoever! “Well, the economy is going so well; it’s starting to overheat. We’ve gotta make sure there isn’t any inflation.” So they start talking about raising interest rates, then the media gets stories in the tech sector about how Apple’s cutting back on production; nobody wants the new iPhones. They’re so bad; they’re so expensive. Everybody’s mad at Amazon because they’re too expensive.
You get just a plethora of news stories ratcheting up the negative, and is it any wonder that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy? So they raise interest rates and talk about it at the Fed. Now the tech stops are going south. I can’t tell you the number of people who are in the market for a living who have told me that they wouldn’t be surprised if people with the power to do so, caused the market to tank a bit in the next two years if it would assure them or give them confidence that Trump could be competed undefeated in 2020.
So this is some of what we’re up against, and I think there’s also legitimate market forces at play here. But I’m telling you that a lot of this is reflecting public attitude, loss of public confidence. And there, if you want to find out why that’s happening, just take a look at the media. As I mention constantly, my hobby is tech and reading about it, and you would not… I mean, the stories on Apple and the new iPhones for the past month?
If you didn’t know better, you would think that not a single new iPhone has been sold because everybody hates them because they’re way too expensive, that Apple doesn’t know their market anymore, that they’ve produced gazillions more iPhones than anybody will ever buy and now they’ve been forced to really, really cut back production. Inventory is skyrocketing. Nobody wants iPhones anymore. The only iPhones people are buying are two- and three-years old.
I mean, it is a constant barrage, and it’s been this way now for three weeks — and the other tech, too. Facebook’s getting the same treatment, and Amazon is getting the same treatment for their deal with “Amazon” Cuomo in New York for that deal they made there in Long Island City. And, of course, the Google guys just on general principle being a bunch of fascists. So there’s a barrage of negative news toward the tech sector, and it’s leading the stock market decline, which the media is applauding, because, of course, the media’s job is to “afflict the comfortable and to comfort the afflicted.”
Of course, the comfortable are the wealthy and the tech stock guys, and the afflicted are their poor customers who are being forced to pay an arm and a leg for their products. “It’s unfair that anything costs anything. It’s just so unfair that you have to pay for things, and the people out there charging for things? Why, they suck, and they ought to be pained and they ought to pay a price!” So there’s this barrage of completely negative news about the economy and specific industries. Is it any wonder that economic indicators here — the stock market, at least — are beginning to lag?