{"id":3298,"date":"2026-04-22T21:01:55","date_gmt":"2026-04-22T21:01:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digitalmarkettrends.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/22\/from-grocery-bills-to-oil-prices-is-trumps-economy-worse-than-bidens\/"},"modified":"2026-04-22T21:01:55","modified_gmt":"2026-04-22T21:01:55","slug":"from-grocery-bills-to-oil-prices-is-trumps-economy-worse-than-bidens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/digitalmarkettrends.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/22\/from-grocery-bills-to-oil-prices-is-trumps-economy-worse-than-bidens\/","title":{"rendered":"From grocery bills to oil prices, is Trump’s economy worse than Biden’s?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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For the better part of four years, Americans lived in a paradoxical US economy. <\/p>\n

It recorded record-low unemployment, produced 16 million new jobs, and wages were rising for the lowest-paid workers, while feeling, to a majority of households, like one of the worst in modern memory.<\/p>\n

Donald Trump won the White House by hammering that feeling. <\/p>\n

Fifteen months into his second term, the feeling has only gotten darker, and this time the data is starting to follow.<\/p>\n

What Biden actually handed over<\/h2>\n

When Biden left office in January 2025<\/a>, the numbers he passed on were objectively strong. Unemployment sat at 4.1%, down from 6.4% when he took office. <\/p>\n

The economy had grown at or above 2.5% for four consecutive years, and the unemployment rate had been at or below 4% for 30 of the prior 38 months, a sustained run not seen since the late 1960s. <\/p>\n

From mid-2022 onward, the US was generating around 240,000 jobs per month, nearly double the historical average.<\/p>\n

Inflation had fallen from a peak of 9.1% in June 2022 to 2.7% by November 2024. <\/p>\n

Wage growth for workers at the bottom of the income ladder had, in a development most economists called unexpected<\/a>, outpaced wage growth at the top for the first time in 40 years.<\/p>\n

Objectively, Donald Trump walked into the most advantageous economic inheritance of any incoming president in recent memory.<\/p>\n

The inflation scar that changed everything<\/h2>\n

None of that mattered in November 2024, because grocery prices were 22.6% higher than when Biden took office, the steepest cumulative increase for any comparable period since 1982. <\/p>\n

Rent. Gas. Mortgage payments. The numbers Americans felt daily bore no resemblance to the GDP figures economists were celebrating.<\/p>\n

Some of it was genuinely beyond Biden’s control. <\/p>\n

The post-pandemic supply chain collapse hit every advanced economy, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent energy prices spiking globally.<\/p>\n

But his $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan<\/a> demonstrably added fuel to demand-side inflation, a policy call most economists now acknowledge was excessive. <\/p>\n

The result was a “vibecession<\/a>“. An economy performing well on paper, while millions of families experienced it as a failure.<\/p>\n

Sentiment cratered and never recovered. Trump spent two years telling voters their pain was real and that he would end it on Day One.<\/p>\n

What has actually happened since?<\/h2>\n

Inflation came in at 3.3% year-over-year in March 2026, pushed by an energy surge from the US\u2013Iran conflict<\/a>, with core inflation at 2.6% and still above the Fed’s 2% target after five consecutive years. <\/p>\n

Trump’s tariffs<\/a> have ultimately raised the effective US import tax rate from roughly 2% to nearly 12% since he took office and added structural upward pressure on prices that predates the war entirely.<\/p>\n

The labour market is where the damage is most visible. US employers added just 181,000 jobs in all of 2025, the lowest annual total outside of a recession since 2003.<\/p>\n

Biden’s economy was generating that figure in a single month during most of his term. <\/p>\n

The hiring rate has fallen to levels last seen during the depths of the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID recession.<\/p>\n

People are not being fired, but almost nobody is being hired. GDP grew just 0.5% annualized in the fourth quarter of 2025, and the probability of recession in the next 12 months is now sitting at 45% according to the latest Wall Street Journal survey<\/a> of forecasters, double what it was in January.<\/p>\n

It is worth being honest about what we do not yet know. <\/p>\n

Trump’s second term is 15 months old. Economies take time to respond to policy, and the Iran war has introduced a genuine exogenous shock that distorts the near-term picture.<\/p>\n

Judging any presidency this early carries real limitations, and the full consequences of both the tariff regime and fiscal policy will take years to surface fully in the data.<\/p>\n

How do Americans feel?<\/h2>\n

The University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment<\/a> Index fell to 47.6 in April 2026, the lowest reading in the survey’s 74-year history, surpassing the prior record set during Biden’s inflation crisis in June 2022. <\/p>\n

Three of the lowest readings ever recorded have now occurred in the past nine months of Trump’s second term. <\/p>\n

A CBS News poll from the same period showed 63% of Americans rated the economy as “bad”<\/a> and 65% disapproved of Trump’s handling of it, despite unemployment sitting at 4.3% and GDP still growing.<\/p>\n

By January 2026, 53% of voters already believed the economy was worse under Trump than under Biden<\/a>, a nine-point reversal from where sentiment stood at the start of his term.<\/p>\n

The political lesson here is one both parties have now learned the hard way. <\/p>\n

Biden delivered a broadly strong economy and was punished because the inflation experience felt catastrophic, regardless of what the wage data showed. <\/p>\n

Trump promised to fix the economy and inherited it at its strongest, yet is now facing the same wall of public disillusionment, built this time from a hiring freeze, persistent inflation, tariff-driven uncertainty, and an energy shock<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Consumer confidence is not a lagging indicator. It shapes spending, hiring decisions, and investment long before the damage shows up in quarterly GDP prints. <\/p>\n

When Americans feel this bad about an economy where unemployment is still near 4%, it is worth taking seriously, because historically, that gap between sentiment and data does not close in the direction of sentiment.<\/p>\n

The post From grocery bills to oil prices, is Trump's economy worse than Biden's?<\/a> appeared first on Invezz<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For the better part of four years, Americans lived in a paradoxical US economy. It recorded record-low unemployment, produced 16 million new jobs, and wages were rising for the lowest-paid workers, while feeling, to a majority of households, like one of the worst in modern memory. Donald Trump won the White House by hammering that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3299,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-investing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalmarkettrends.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalmarkettrends.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalmarkettrends.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalmarkettrends.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalmarkettrends.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3298"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/digitalmarkettrends.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3298\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalmarkettrends.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalmarkettrends.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalmarkettrends.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalmarkettrends.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}