The June and July levels above 1.9 million haven't been seen since November 2021.
If they lived through that, we can live through this, and we will.
I don't remember why I started doing this chart in May of whenever it was, but I stuck with it over the years.
It was probably some nutball during the Great Financial Crisis screaming that foreigners were dumping U. S. Treasury securities and we were all doomed!
The nutballs have been saying that for a loooooooooooooong time.
These are the raw, as-reported numbers at the time, and do not incorporate any subsequent revisions.
In May 2025, 43% of the over $9 trillion in outstanding value for foreign held UST was "Official", that is, by governments. And 89.8% of that 43% is invested in longer term Notes and Bonds.
Year over year in May the value of what is owned by foreigners is up a whopping 11.25%.
Many people in addition to governments around the world are banking on the full faith and credit of the United States because they can't really bank on their own governments.
And that's a fact, Jack.
Core personal consumption expenditures year over year have been stuck in a range of 2.78% year over year for eighteen long months.
This is shaping up to become the regrettable new normal.
Core pce had averaged just 1.50% year over year for twelve years from 2009-2020 inclusive. The rate has been 85% higher than that for a year and a half now on an average basis.
The 2.78% rate is but little lower than the 2024 average of 2.81%, and the 2.75% average for the first six months of 2025 still rounds up to 2.8%.
You remember 2024. Joe Biden was president, and so far in 2025 he might as well still be.
Inflation is the worst tax. Unfortunately it's the Uniparty's policy.
The seasonally-adjusted annual rate of Trump's tariffs leaped from $96 billion in 1Q to $266 billion in 2Q.
The federal government farts through $20 billion every day, so this annualized tariff revenue goes Poof in less than two weeks, matching just 3.6% of federal outlays.
The numbskulls in the US Senate like Josh Hawley want to redistribute these tax revenues in the form of rebate checks to the taxpayers.
Wouldn't it have been easier and more efficient and more fair not to have taxed us in the first place?
Note that Donald Trump's Bureau of Economic Analysis, run by Howard Lutnick, still must call this what it is, taxes on imports lol, despite what his Treasury Secretary was still saying in June:
Bessent claims tariffs aren’t taxes.
The real GDP report is out and it looks pretty good at 3% for the first estimate for 2Q2025, especially in comparison with the -0.5% result for 1Q.
If only it were so.
From the second quarter of 2017, the year when Trump's tax reform became law on December 22nd, until now real GDP has grown at a compound annual rate of just 2.456%. For the seventy years before that, the compound annual rate of growth was 3.182%.
Trump's so-called pro-growth tax reform fell short by almost 23%.
The problem remains the lingering after effects of the Great Recession, the Great Financial Crisis, the Housing Bubble, whatever you want to call it. The Trump tax reform of 2017 didn't really do anything to address it meaningfully, just as Obama didn't, and also Biden in his turn.
From 2Q2008 to 2Q2025, the compound annual rate of real GDP growth has been just 1.99% vs. 3.421% for the sixty-one years prior to that, starting in 2Q1947.
America remains 42% behind its old self.
That's why everyone is unhappy, but especially the young. They desperately feel the futility of the situation, encumbered as so many of them are with student loan debt for the degrees which are not translating into the key to the future.
That's the sad reality of where we are, and where we are likely to stay for the foreseeable future.
But as always, the first step is admitting you have a problem instead of trying to put lipstick on that pig.
... The 9:25 p.m. update listed a 5.7 feet wave in Kahului, 4.9 feet in Hilo, 3.9 feet in Hanalei, 2.3 feet in Makapuu, 1.2 feet in Waianae and 1.1 feet in Honolulu. Other Hawaii areas listed were about 1 foot or less.
Television footage showed some flooding in parking lots in Hilo Bay and Hanalei, but no significant damage has been reported. ...
More.
The goods trade deficit in May was $96 billion, in June $85 billion.
The only thing that's changed is consumers are now being taxed on those trade deficits. The numbskulls of the GOP U. S. Senate are proposing rebates of these taxes to the people paying them.
It's all completely ludicrous.
It would have been easier simply not to have imposed the taxes in the first place.
If there's a way to lower the standard of living of American consumers, Mad King Ludwig is sure to find it.
President Donald Trump on Monday reduced to less than two weeks his deadline for Russian President Vladimir Putin to either reach a peace deal with Ukraine or face massive “secondary tariffs” on Moscow’s trade partners.
Trump previously gave Putin a 50-day deadline, which was set to expire in early September.
But he said Monday that the U.S. does not see “any progress being made.” ...
I remember the days when every grocery item came with a price tag.
When those went away there was an outcry, saying shelf pricing would be manipulated to get you to buy the item at a lower displayed price but charge you more for it at the register because the price displayed was wrong.
You used to get the item for free if that happened.
Now it happens all the time, but all you get is a refund for the difference, IF YOU STAND IN LINE AT CUSTOMER SERVICE TO GET IT.
Every transaction is going to become a negotiation like we're a goddamn third world country.
... As Heritage Board Chairman Barb Gaby and President Kevin Roberts wrote in their note to staff, alumni, and the many friends gained over the past 52 years:
Ed believed in addition, not subtraction. Unity, not uniformity. One of his favorite mantras was ‘You win through multiplication and addition, not through division and subtraction.’ His legacy is not just the institution he built, but the movement he helped grow — a movement rooted in faith, family, freedom, and the Founding.
Feulner’s words contain practical wisdom. In this era of political polarization and cultural fragmentation, they continue to serve us as a powerful tactical roadmap. In the spirit of self-governance, they call for a movement that grows by building coalitions, not by purging dissent; that persuades rather than polarizes; and that unites Americans around shared values rather than dividing them by ideology. ...
More.
Editorial: Trump must act quickly to avert a harvest crisis
With harvest season about to begin in earnest, farmers are desperate for laborers to pick their fruit and vegetables. Already in the Pacific Northwest, much of the cherry crop was left to rot because of the shortage of agricultural workers.
The crisis will soon roll into Michigan, where apples, cherries, blueberries, asparagus and other crops are rapidly ripening. Hand-picked specialty crops are a $6.3 billion industry in Michigan, supporting 41,000 jobs.
The shortage of farm workers has been building for years, due to an aging agricultural workforce, competition from more lucrative and less grueling jobs and restrictions on immigrant labor.
This year, it is exacerbated by the Trump administration's crackdown on unauthorized immigrants and the deportation of those who have entered the country illegally.
Estimates are that 42% of farm workers are undocumented migrants. Recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids on farms employing migrants have frightened away many of those workers from the fields where they had been working.
But the work they do hasn't gone away. Fruit and vegetables still need to be harvested. If they're not, it will lead to food waste, shortages and higher prices on the grocery shelves.
When asked about the worker shortage, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said the solution lies in greater mechanization of farms and matching the 34 million able bodied Americans who must find jobs or lose their Medicaid benefits with farmers who need workers.
While Rollins is correct that those who can work should be expected to, it's doubtful even the risk of losing health care benefits will coax the jobless into hot, backbreaking farm work.
Her solutions will take time and large capital investments. They won't save this year's harvest.
The Trump administration must take emergency action to assure there are enough workers to bring in the crops this summer and fall.
Rather than deporting migrants willing to fill essential jobs such as harvesting, the administration should grant them seasonal visas and a no-deportation guarantee as long as they are working on farms.
Beyond that, reform is needed for the H-2A visa program that allows farmers to legally employ temporary workers from another country. The application process is too complex and time-consuming. It must be simplified; farmers need help now.
Also at issue is the federal mandatory minimum wage for H-2A visa holders, now set at $18.50 an hour. That's nearly $8 an hour higher than the state minimum wage in Michigan. When added to housing and other costs for these workers, many farmers have to limit their use of the visas.
Longer term, resources should be devoted to recruiting domestic workers for the agriculture industry. Farmers are also being encouraged to raise wages for native-born workers, add benefits and improve working conditions.
All of that is expensive and will inevitably show up in grocery prices. But so will the shortages caused by allowing crops to rot in fields.
The most sensible option for this season is to back off deportation of farm workers while solutions are pursued for either replacing them or giving them legal status.
House Freedom Caucus: How We're Delivering For Taxpayers in July 2025 | Opinion
... By applying relentless pressure, providing education to the public, and offering alternative solutions, the HFC helped secure significant savings for the American people in the final piece of legislation. ... The national debt now stands at a staggering $37 trillion and is rising by nearly $2 trillion annually.
In fourteen business days the national debt is up half a trillion dollars to $36.7 trillion from $36.2 trillion on July 3rd.
Fourteen days.
They can't even tell the truth about that.
COVID-19 Is Rising Again. Here’s What to Know
As much as we want to put it behind us, COVID-19 isn’t going away. Cases are currently rising across the country in a summer surge. ...
I got ur summer surge right here lol:
... John Ioannidis, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and the study’s first author, said: “I think early estimates were based on many parameters having values that are incompatible with our current understanding.
“In principle, targeting the populations who would get the vast majority of the benefit and letting alone those with questionable risk-benefit and cost-benefit makes a lot of sense.
“Aggressive mandates and the zealotry to vaccinate everyone at all cost were probably a bad idea.”
More than 13 billion Covid vaccine doses have been administered since 2021. But there have been mounting concerns that vaccines could be harmful for some people, particularly the young, and that the risk was not worth the benefit for a population at little risk from Covid. ...
The over-70s made up nearly 70 per cent of the lives saved, while those aged 60 to 70 accounted for a further 20 per cent. In contrast, under-20s made up just 0.01 per cent of lives saved, and 20 to 30s were 0.07 per cent. ...
The new research was published in Jama Health Forum.
The S&P 500 averaged 6,029.95 in June.
Using 1Q2025 GDP, current valuation of SPX 6,388.64 is 213, 163% higher than the 1938-2019 mean of 81.
Full year valuations around 213 were last seen in 1928-1930: 204, 248, and 228.
Real return since August 2000 through June 2025, two months shy of 25-years, is now up to 5.08% per annum vs. 10.75% per annum October 1975 through August 2000.
The mouse that roared.
The average price of a new vehicle in 1978 was about $5,780.
Adjusted for inflation to 2024, that would be about $27,852.
The actual average price in 2024 was about $48,724.
Gasoline prices are moderating slowly in 2025 even as the inflation-adjusted price rises to $3.27.
Gasoline actually averaged $3.27 in the first half of 2025, dead on the money for what it should cost if it were only adjusted for inflation since 1978.
Gasoline retailers like convenience stores don't make their money on gasoline, with profit margins on gasoline in the 2% range. They make it on stuff like milk, the free-market price of which is a great mystery. AI thinks the unregulated price of milk right now would be about $4.00/gallon.
At the corner convenience store near where I live, a gallon of whole milk is a whopping $4.99, but eight miles down the road at my grocery it's only $3.45, so it's a mark-up of 45% for the convenience.
But my grocery offers a routine discount coupon of 60 cents per gallon of milk, which brings the price down to $2.85, which Sam's can't beat at $3.23. Milk is my grocery's loss leader to get me in the store, like rotisserie chicken is a loss leader for Sam's and Costco, or like gasoline.
Gasoline this morning at Sam's is $3.01/gallon.
My momma told me, you better shop around.
Meanwhile average fuel economy in 2023 is 27.1 miles on a gallon of gasoline, up from about 17.6 in 1978.
Seems like we should be doing better in that department.
At the same time, the average age of a vehicle on the road in 1978 was about 6.6 years, compared with 12.6 years in 2024, up 91%.
... Prior to the Israeli and U.S. strikes, Iran had enriched at least 880 pounds of highly enriched uranium to 60 percent according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Relatively speaking, even if it would take some time for Iran to enrich that stockpile to weapons-grade highly enriched uranium (90 percent ) — the amount needed for a modern nuclear missile strike — it could use the 60 percent stockpile it already has to construct Hiroshima-like nuclear bombs.
Iran Watch estimates that Khamenei has enough to build “one or more” of the gun-type bomb known as “Little Boy,” the type of used in Hiroshima. It would only take 132 pounds of uranium enriched to 80 percent.
... while much of the media’s attention has been on Khamenei’s stores of 60 percent highly enriched uranium, we cannot overlook Iran’s 20 percent and 5 percent stockpiles. Prior to the June strikes, Tehran had 606 pounds of the former and 12,150 pounds of the latter.
Iran Watch ominously warns that “20 percent enriched uranium is approximately 90% of the way to weapon-grade and Iran’s stockpile would be sufficient to fuel at least two implosion weapons.” Plus, if further enriched, eventually Khamenei’s 5% stockpile could be used to “fuel at least 10 implosion weapons.” ...
Uranium highly enriched to 60 percent is in a gaseous state and can be stored in cylinders approximately the same size of a scuba tank. Moving or hiding some of them could have been as easy as putting them in the back of a small car or SUV. ...
More.
6,358.91
From the story here:
... “So far, the tariff strategy Trump is pursuing looks very inspired, generating serious income, resulting in major investments in the U.S. to avoid the tariffs, and has yet to cause the disruptions and inflation that the naysayers said were certain,” said Louis Navellier, founder and chief investment officer at Navellier & Associates. “The stock market certainly reflects no fear of negative consequences.” ...
That's how they got Manafort after all.
As ever, it is primarily Trump's own clumsy mouth which is what gets him into trouble and keeps him from respectability, but that doesn't mean he isn't right about Obama.
37 peacocks reported missing from historic hotel...
... He added that the four remaining peacocks at the hotel are acting upset and demonstrating behavior he has “never seen from them before.” ...
... On Tuesday, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said he was speaking with Maxwell’s defense lawyer to see if Maxwell “would be willing to speak with prosecutors” to see if she “has information about anyone who has committed crimes against victims.” ...
... Blanche previously served as a criminal defense lawyer for Trump when the president was indicted in four separate cases after ending his first White House term in January 2017. ...
This revision incorporates data revisions since the 2004-05 season, now to two decimal places instead of one starting in season 2005-06.
Conclusions remain unchanged from previously: overall anomaly trend is slightly cooler, forecasting a drier West Coast and wetter Great Lakes region; cool anomaly seasons are trending slightly less severe, and the trend of warm anomaly seasons trending higher may have been broken, but only time will tell.
All prices are FRED data from the St. Louis Fed in U.S. dollars.
The headlines are correct. Average beef prices are out of this world in June 2025:
Round Roast $7.762/lb
All Uncooked Beef Roasts $8.203
Ground Chuck $6.103
Choice Chuck Roast $8.197
100% Ground Beef $6.12
All Uncooked Ground Beef $6.342
All Uncooked Beef Steaks $11.491
Choice Sirloin Steak $12.923.
But that's not all:
Whole Chicken $2.086
Frozen Orange Juice Concentrate $4.493
Coffee $8.132
Potato Chips $6.815
Ice Cream $6.493.
Most of the other items in my list of over 40 basic food products remain near their average all time highs. Food price inflation was 3% year-over-year in June 2025. There has been no actual food price deflation since 2016.
The British tabloids have been full of stories about Russian threats to use nuclear weapons against the UK.
... Astronomers have found roughly 95 per cent of the near-Earth objects larger than 1km, and none of them poses any threat to Earth. We know much less about the smaller ones. An asteroid as slender as 50m across can wreck a city. Of the nearly quarter of a million that are around that size in Earth’s neighbourhood, 93 per cent remain undiscovered. ...
In July 1994, fragments of a comet called Shoemaker-Levy 9 smashed into Jupiter, and Nasa, for the first time ever, caught the spectacle on video. Later that summer, Congress tasked Nasa with mapping all near-Earth objects larger than 1km, sobered by the sight of the comet’s cataclysmic Earth-sized impacts. The brief was then expanded to include 90 per cent of all objects 140m or larger — a task that is still less than halfway complete. ...
In 2028, Nasa plans to launch an infrared asteroid-detecting telescope called NEO Surveyor. The following year, which the UN has designated “International Year of Asteroid Awareness and Planetary Defence”, an asteroid called Apophis [~375m] will pass within 32,000km of Earth, closer than some satellites. A Nasa spacecraft is on its way to study Apophis in detail. ...
More.
We're getting more like China everyday.
Push for More Organ Transplants Putting Donors at Risk...
... Circulatory death donation is different. These patients are on life support, often in a coma. Their prognoses are more of a medical judgment call.
They are alive, with some brain activity, but doctors have determined that they are near death and won’t recover. If relatives agree to donation, doctors withdraw life support and wait for the patient’s heart to stop. This has to happen within an hour or two for the organs to be considered viable. After the person is declared dead, surgeons go in.
The Times found that some organ procurement organizations — the nonprofits in each state that have federal contracts to coordinate transplants — are aggressively pursuing circulatory death donors and pushing families and doctors toward surgery. Hospitals are responsible for patients up to the moment of death, but some are allowing procurement organizations to influence treatment decisions.
Fifty-five medical workers in 19 states told The Times they had witnessed at least one disturbing case of donation after circulatory death.
Workers in several states said they had seen coordinators persuading hospital clinicians to administer morphine, propofol and other drugs to hasten the death of potential donors. ...
Circulatory death donation used to be largely forbidden. That began to change in the 1990s, when a dying patient asked the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center to remove her life support and donate her organs. The hospital honored her wishes, then spent two years creating guidelines for future cases. Use of the practice gradually spread. ...
... the EU is now promising to cut carbon emissions by 90% in just 15 years. This goes even further than its already foolhardy promise of a 55% cut by 2030. ...
The EU splurged $381 billion just in 2024 on solar panels, wind turbines, electric cars and the like — more than its entire spending on defense. This is delivering skyrocketing electricity bills — last year they were two times higher than in the US. ...
... the climate impact from the EU’s policies will be next-to-nothing. Run the promised 90% by 2040 and net-zero by 2050 in the United Nations’ own climate model and compare the temperature outcome with the current policy. Because the EU matters little in global emissions and because it has already cut emissions significantly, it will only reduce global emissions through the 21st century by a small 3%. The temperature difference in 2050 is a vanishing 0.02°F and even by 2100 the impact will be impossible to measure at 0.07°F.
All while models show that the cost for the EU by mid-century could be more than $3 trillion every year — more than all current public spending in the EU. ...
More.
Russ Vought, Trump’s top budget adviser, cited “premium marble” in a letter to Powell last week as an example of the “ostentatious overhaul.” ...
Trump issued [an] executive order in December 2020, which criticized modernist architecture and expressed a preference for “beautiful” classical buildings with more [costly] traditional designs. ...
The bunker buster bombs were made for Fordow, so they bombed Fordow with them, and talked Fordow, Fordow, Fordow, "obliteration", blah blah blah.
Military-industrial complex, rinse and repeat.
Meanwhile the threat remains, and the not serious people remain in charge.
Trump Always Chickens Out.
New U.S. assessment finds American strikes destroyed only one of three Iranian nuclear sites
WASHINGTON — One of the three nuclear enrichment sites in Iran struck by the United States last month was mostly destroyed, setting work there back significantly. But the two others were not as badly damaged and may have been degraded only to a point where nuclear enrichment could resume in the next several months if Iran wants it to, according to a recent U.S. assessment of the destruction caused by the military operation, five current and former U.S. officials familiar with the assessment told NBC News. ...
U.S. officials believe the attack on Fordo, which has long been viewed as a critical component of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, was successful in setting back Iranian enrichment capabilities at that site by as much as two years, according to two of the current officials.
Much of the administration’s public messaging about the strikes has focused on Fordo. ...
U.S. officials knew before the airstrikes that Iran had structures and enriched uranium at Natanz and Isfahan that were likely to be beyond the reach of even America’s 30,000-pound GBU-57 “bunker buster” bombs, three of the sources said. Those bombs, which had never been used in combat before the strikes, were designed with the deeply buried facilities carved into the side of a mountain at Fordo in mind.
As early as 2023, though, there were indications that Iran was digging tunnels at Natanz that were below where the GBU-57 could reach. There are also tunnels deep underground at Isfahan. The United States hit surface targets at Isfahan with Tomahawk missiles and did not drop GBU-57s there, but it did use them at Natanz. ...
Trump was briefed on the so-called all-in plan, but it was rejected ultimately because it would have required a sustained period of conflict. ...
Before the June airstrikes, the regime had enough fissile material for about nine to 10 bombs, according to U.S. officials and United Nations inspectors. ...
Vance casts Senate tiebreaker to advance Trump’s DOGE-inspired cuts
... This was Vance’s sixth tiebreaker in the Senate, following his deciding vote on July 1 to pass the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. ...
Here are the current June 2025 yoy figures for core producer price increases Dec-Jun, followed by the figures reported the previous month, followed by the figures as originally reported:
