Friday, August 22, 2025
Thursday, August 21, 2025
Tulane University's Walter Isaacson calls out Trump's state capitalism for Nvidia, Intel, and Advanced Micro Devices
... “That state capitalism often evolves into crony capitalism, where you have favored companies and industries that pay tribute to the leader, and that is a recipe for not only disaster, but just sort of a corrupt sense of messiness,” he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” ... Earlier this month, both Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices agreed to pay 15% of their China revenues to the U.S. government for export licenses to sell certain chips there. ...
Trump adds $1 trillion to the national debt in record time and S&P Global underscores its own irrelevance by maintaining the U.S. AA+ credit rating
Trump tariff revenue expected to offset tax bill impact, S&P says in U.S. credit rating hold
... "We could lower the rating over the next two to three years if already high deficits increase ..." lol.
These people are afraid of Trump.
They don't want to be singled out for Trump's daily Two Minutes Hate.
They don't want to be the next Jerome Powell, or Lisa Cook, or Volodymyr Zelensky.
Meanwhile year to date the Trump deficit is running $112 billion ahead of Biden's last deficit. DOGE so-called spending cuts and Trump Tariffs have done nothing to reduce it.
Wednesday, August 20, 2025
Tuesday, August 19, 2025
The Trump administration's Howard Lutnick doubles down on the state capitalism of the CHIPS Act of Joe Biden
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Tuesday that Intel must give the U.S. government an equity stake in the company in return for CHIPS Act funds.
“We should get an equity stake for our money,” Lutnick said on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.” “So we’ll deliver the money, which was already committed under the Biden administration. We’ll get equity in return for it.” ...
Lutnick said any potential arrangement wouldn’t provide the government with voting or governance rights in Intel.
“It’s not governance, we’re just converting what was a grant under Biden into equity for the Trump administration, for the American people,” Lutnick said. “Non-voting.”
Intel declined to comment.
Lutnick also suggested that President Donald Trump could seek out similar deals with other CHIPS recipients. ...
“The Biden administration literally was giving Intel for free, and giving TSMC money for free, and all these companies just giving them money for free,” Lutnick said. “Donald Trump turns that into saying, ‘Hey, we want equity for the money. If we’re going to give you the money, we want a piece of the action.’ ” ...
Um, I don't think getting an equity stake was anywhere in the bill.
Just another example of Trump executive branch overreach, but will the supine GOP Congress care?
Monday, August 18, 2025
Two weeks Trump was already at it again on Friday before meeting with Putin on Saturday
... Trump
said on Friday he did not immediately need to consider retaliatory
tariffs on countries such as China for buying Russian oil - which is
subject to a range of Western sanctions - but might have to "in two or
three weeks." ...
More.
It's been a long war against the NFL
“The left targets something it doesn’t like, and they never give up, and they keep going until they ruin it. And I’m telling you, National Football League is in their cross-hairs right now,” Limbaugh said. “One of the most important planks of liberalism, militant feminism, is the vehicle which is being utilized in this latest effort to undercut the game.”
-- Rush Limbaugh, September 2014, here.
Sunday, August 17, 2025
Saturday, August 16, 2025
Frozen orange juice concentrate, coffee, bananas, and chocolate chip cookies also made new record high average prices in July 2025
Frozen orange juice concentrate $4.641/12oz
Coffee $8.414/lb
Bananas $0.657
Chocolate Chip cookies $5.264
Even though bananas and chocolate chip cookies made new highs, they are good values adjusted for inflation since 1980. Bananas are 49% lower than they should be, and the cookies are 12% lower. Most US bananas come from Guatemala, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Colombia, and Honduras.
Coffee is running 3.9% ahead of its inflation adjusted price from July 1984, and OJ is running 3.4% ahead of its inflation adjusted price since July 1980.
All nearly fifty food items I track are still near their all time highs.
We've had no fewer than seven spikes of serious food inflation running ahead of core inflation just since the year 2000.
Agricultural export prices also have soared since then. What a coincidence.
All eight beef prices I track made new record average highs in July 2025
Adjusted for inflation since July 1984, 100% ground beef should cost $3.88/lb in July 2025, but it's actually 61% higher than that.
100% Ground Beef $6.254/lb
Ground Chuck 6.338
Round Roast 7.909
All uncooked beef roasts 8.397
Choice chuck roast 8.439
Round steak 8.69
All uncooked beef steaks 11.875
Choice sirloin steak 13.554
Friday, August 15, 2025
Thursday, August 14, 2025
My God, that sentence
 |
| https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/08/13/nasa-perseverance-rock-helmet-photo/85649312007/ |
At least Santelli told the truth
... We’re a couple seconds away, folks, from our July release of the Producer Price Index.
Headline number is– WHOPPINGLY big! Oh my goodness!
Up 9 tenths of a percent. Up 9 tenths. And if you strip out food and energy, guess what? It’s still up 9/10ths. Boy, that equals June of 22! ...
More.
Forecasters YUGELY underestimated July producer price increases, aka wholesale prices, forecasting +0.2% month over month, getting +0.9% instead lol
Hey, they're only off by a factor of 4.5x.
Low inflation expectations based on June were clobbered by the facts, but to hell with the facts. $SPX is down only 0.07% at this hour.
The market cheerleaders desperately cling to the belief that the Fed must lower interest rates in September. When the numbers come in 0.1 below expectations, they go wild and drive up stocks like madmen believing they must be right. When the forecast misses like this they just hold.
On a year over year basis, the forecast was for +2.5% for overall wholesale prices, but they got +3.3% instead, seasonally adjusted.
For core wholesale prices the consensus forecast was for +2.9% year over year, but they got +3.7% instead, again seasonally adjusted.
Wholesale prices rose 0.9% in July, much more than expected
Wholesale prices rose far more than expected in July, providing a potential sign that inflation is still a threat to the U.S. economy, a Bureau of Labor Statistics report Thursday showed.
The producer price index, which measures final demand goods and services prices, jumped 0.9% on the month, compared with the Dow Jones estimate for a 0.2% gain. It was the biggest monthly increase since June 2022.
Excluding food and energy prices, core PPI rose 0.9% against the forecast for 0.3%. Excluding food, energy and trade services, the index was up 0.6%, the biggest gain since March 2022. ...
It's not a potential sign of inflation, you idiots. It's a real sign.
The year over year numbers, not seasonally adjusted, for core wholesale price increases in the July report are oddly unchanged from the June report in no respect, for the increases since October 2024. In fact, the figures are exactly the same to five decimal places. It's like everybody went on vacation and just copied and pasted and went to the beach:
Nov 2024: 3.35987
Dec 2024: 3.74962
Jan 2025: 3.92532
Feb 2025: 3.73239
Mar 2025: 3.78846
Apr 2025: 3.07652
May 2025: 3.21542
Jun 2025: 2.62853
and Jul 2025: 3.65568.
The average of these Nov thru May is 3.54965. July looks like that, but June sure the hell still does not.
I smell a rat.
Meanwhile . . .
Core cpi inflation yoy averaged 2.9% in the first half of 2025, but 3.1% in July.
Core pce inflation yoy averaged 2.8% in the first half of 2025 (July numbers come Aug 29th).
But core wholesale prices were up 3.4% in the first half on average, and 3.7% in July according to today's report.
How long can producers not pass that along? Or do we have a broader issue here with trustworthy numbers, because Mad King Ludwig is in charge?
Trump the fool one year ago: We will slash electricity prices by half within twelve months, eighteen months max
Electricity will be ten cents again when pigs fly.
“Under my administration, we will be slashing energy and electricity prices by half within 12 months, at a maximum 18 months,” he told an audience in North Carolina in August 2024.
Quoted here.
Wednesday, August 13, 2025
Elon Musk's phony Doge spending cut math was basically like positing there was a $20,000 credit limit when there wasn't, canceling it and then saying, ‘I’ve just saved $20,000'
... DOGE’s savings calculations are based on faulty math. The group uses the maximum spending possible under each contract as its baseline — meaning all money an agency could spend in future fiscal years. That amount can far exceed what the government has actually committed to pay out.
Counting this “ceiling value” gives a false picture of savings for taxpayers.
“That’s the equivalent of basically taking out a credit card with a $20,000 credit limit, canceling it and then saying, ‘I’ve just saved $20,000,’” said Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law studies at George Washington University Law School. “Anything that’s been said publicly about [DOGE’s] savings is meaningless.” ...
Peak drinking in 1977 coincides with peak Baby Boom turning 20 lol, now a record low 54% drink in 2025
1958 was a close second place drinking low year at 55% as their parents realized "My God, what have we done?" ha ha ha.
Seriously now, 71% drank in 1976, 1977, and 1978, the Baby Boom Bender.
Prior to 1984, many states like Wisconsin had lowered the drinking age to 18 from 21 because the voting age had been changed to 18 in 1971 by the 26th Amendment.
The National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984 turned this back the other way again by withholding federal highway funds from states that did not raise their drinking age back to 21, which Wisconsin finally did in 1986. Wisconsin had a tiered system between 1984 and 1986 where the drinking age was 19 for beer and wine and 21 for liquor.
Gallup reports here:
... The highs of 68% to 71% were all recorded between 1974 and 1981. ...
This anthem made its debut in 1985:
American Enterprise Institute's Stan Veuger: Trump's pick for BLS isn't qualified
... “The
hope was that he would pick someone . . . who people would have trust
in and could lead the BLS in an appropriate way, with relevant
experience and, ideally, not hyper-partisan,” said Stan Veuger, senior
fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute think-tank.
“EJ Antoni is really the opposite of that.”
“Even the people who may be somewhat sympathetic to his economic policy views don’t think he’s qualified,” added Veuger. ...
More.
OMG the dumbest line in this story: people who buy trucks often use them to haul things
Well no shit, Sherlock.
The Electric Pickup Truck Boom Turned Into a Big Bust
... many electric versions just aren’t up for the task. ...
Pickup sales, first half of 2025:
EVs 35,000
Internal Combustion: 1,600,000
Rasmussen Reports' Trump Approval Index hasn't been net positive since Feb 19th, except for Mar 26th lol
They got tired of my answers and stopped calling me weeks ago.
What a pussy
What part of "Russia invaded Ukraine and keeps bombing the shit out of it" don't you understand?
this is for the president to go and get a better understanding ...
Tuesday, August 12, 2025
CPI food inflation was 2.9% year over year in July 2025 vs. the 1.86% average 2009-2020 and we're supposed to be happy that the Fed might cut interest rates in September
The current rate of food inflation is running 56% higher than the average rate for the entire prior decade and more.
Nothing would sing "we can't fix it" more than a rate cut in September, but three in the Autumn would shout "we don't care!"
Core cpi inflation year over year is back above 3% to 3.1% in July 2025, more than expected, the second consecutive monthly increase
But of course overall inflation is what CNBC wants to trumpet because there was an expectation for higher at 2.8% yoy and they got lower.
But one could just as easily say the tariffs are to blame for the higher than expected core rate at 3.1% instead of 3%.
But that wouldn't be cheerleading the markets, now would it?
Consumer prices rise 2.7% annually in July, less than expected amid tariff worries
Trump nominates Heritage Project 2025 economist to BLS, the very guy who had openly called for the firing of Erika McEntarfer at BLS after the disastrous July jobs numbers came out
If you thought the jobs numbers were unbelievable before, just wait.
... Antoni is the chief economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation and has been a longtime critic of the BLS. ...
Remember when Trump said he knew nothing about Project 2025?
Yeah, that was a good one.
Monday, August 11, 2025
The Wall Street Journal's Greg Ip observes America under Trump becoming more like China under Xi
Greg Ip
Recent examples include President Trump’s demand that Intel’s chief executive resign; the 15% of certain chip sales to China that Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices will share with Washington; the “golden share” Washington will get in U.S. Steel as a condition of Nippon Steel’s takeover; and the $1.5 trillion of promised investment from trading partners Trump plans to personally direct.
This isn’t socialism, in which the state owns the means of production. It is more like state capitalism, a hybrid between socialism and capitalism in which the state guides the decisions of nominally private enterprises.
China calls its hybrid “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” The U.S. hasn’t gone as far as China or even milder practitioners of state capitalism such as Russia, Brazil and, at times, France. So call this variant “state capitalism with American characteristics.” It is still a sea change from the free market ethos the U.S. once embodied.
We wouldn’t be dabbling with state capitalism if not for the public’s and both parties’ belief that free-market capitalism wasn’t working. That system encouraged profit-maximizing CEOs to move production abroad. The result was a shrunken manufacturing workforce, dependence on China for vital products such as critical minerals, and underinvestment in the industries of the future such as clean energy and semiconductors.
The federal government has often waded into the corporate world. It commandeered production during World War II and, under the Defense Production Act, emergencies such as the Covid-19 pandemic. It bailed out banks and car companies during the 2007-09 financial crisis. Those, however, were temporary expedients.
Former President Joe Biden went further, seeking to shape the actual structure of industry. His Inflation Reduction Act authorized $400 billion in clean-energy loans. The Chips and Science Act earmarked $39 billion in subsidies for domestic semiconductor manufacturing. Of that, $8.5 billion went to Intel, giving Trump leverage to demand the removal of its CEO over past ties to China. (Intel so far has refused.)
Biden overrode U.S. Steel’s management and shareholders to block Nippon Steel’s takeover, though his staff saw no national-security risk. Trump reversed that veto while extracting the “golden share” that he can use to influence the company’s decisions. In design and name it mimics the golden shares that private Chinese companies must issue to the CCP.
Biden officials had mulled a sovereign-wealth fund to finance strategically important but commercially risky projects such as in critical minerals, which China dominates. Last month, Trump’s Department of Defense said it would take a 15% stake in MP Materials, a miner of critical minerals.
Many in the West admire China for its ability to turbocharge growth through massive feats of infrastructure building, scientific advance and promotion of favored industries. American efforts are often bogged down amid the checks, balances and compromises of pluralistic democracy.
In his forthcoming book, “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future,” author Dan Wang writes: “China is an engineering state, building big at breakneck speed, in contrast to the United States’ lawyerly society, blocking everything it can, good and bad.”
To admirers, Trump’s appeal is his willingness to bulldoze those lawyerly obstacles. He has imposed tariffs on an array of countries and sectors, seizing authority that is supposed to belong to Congress. He extracted $1.5 trillion in investment pledges from Japan, the European Union and South Korea that he claims he will personally direct, though no legal mechanism for doing so appears to exist. (Those pledges are already in dispute.)
There are reasons state capitalism never caught on before. The state can’t allocate capital more efficiently than private markets. Distortions, waste and cronyism typically follow. Russia, Brazil and France have grown much more slowly than the U.S.
Chinese state capitalism isn’t the success story it seems. Barry Naughton of the University of California, San Diego has documented how China’s rapid growth since 1979 has come from market sources, not the state. As Chinese leader Xi Jinping has reimposed state control, growth has slowed. China is awash with savings, but the state wastes much of it. From steel to vehicles, excess capacity leads to plummeting prices and profits.
The U.S. hasn’t fared any better. Interventions made in the name of national security or kick-starting infant industries lead to boondoggles like Foxconn’s promised factory in Wisconsin or Tesla’s solar-panel factory in Buffalo, N.Y.
State capitalism is an all-of-society affair in China, directed from Beijing via millions of cadres in local governments and company boardrooms. In the U.S., it consists largely of Oval Office announcements lacking any policy or institutional framework. “The core characteristic of China’s state capitalism is discipline, and Trump is the complete opposite of that,” Wang said in an interview.
State capitalism is a means of political, not just economic, control. Xi ruthlessly deploys economic levers to crush any challenge to party primacy. In 2020, Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma, arguably the country’s most famous business leader, criticized Chinese regulators for stifling financial innovation. Retaliation was swift. Regulators canceled the initial public offering of Ma’s financial company, Ant Group, and eventually fined it $2.8 billion for anticompetitive behavior. Ma briefly disappeared from public view.
Trump has similarly deployed executive orders and regulatory powers against media companies, banks, law firms and other companies he believes oppose him, while rewarding executives who align themselves with his priorities.
In Trump’s first term, CEOs routinely spoke out when they disagreed with his policies such as on immigration and trade. Now, they shower him with donations and praise, or are mostly silent.
Trump is also seeking political control over agencies that have long operated at arm’s length from the White House, such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Federal Reserve. That, too, has echoes of China where the bureaucracy is fully subordinate to the ruling party.
Trump has long admired the control Xi exercises over his country, but there are, in theory, limits to how far he can emulate him.
American democracy constrains the state through an independent judiciary, free speech, due process and the diffusion of power among multiple levels and branches of government. How far state capitalism ultimately displaces free-market capitalism in the U.S. depends on how well those checks and balances hold up.
Trump invokes emergency powers yet again, takes over DC police for 30 days under Home Rule Act over non-existent crime surge except against his own people, deploys National Guard
This is pissing-match security theatre: "If Biden can do it so can I".
... his emergency control is set to expire after a maximum of 30 days,
according to the statute. That can be extended, but only if Congress
passes a law authorizing it.
While Trump has frequently complained about crime in the district, violent crime there has fallen to a 30-year low as of January, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. ...
Sunday, August 10, 2025
Andrew Sullivan makes Trump subhuman the way Mark Levin and Michael Savage have made their enemies subhuman, says the American people no longer want to govern themselves
They shoot wild boar in Texas from helicopters, don't they?
... Trump is conservatism’s actual nemesis: a wild boar — psychologically incapable of understanding anything but dominance and revenge, with no knowledge of history, crashing obliviously and malevolently through the ruined landscape of our constitutional democracy.
This very Greek tragedy — conservatives killing the Constitution they love because they hate the left more — is made more poignant by Trump’s utter cluelessness: he doesn’t even intend to end the American experiment in self-government and individual freedom. He isn’t that sophisticated. He is ending it simply because he knows no other way of being a human being. He cannot tolerate any system where he does not have total control. Character counts, as conservatives once insisted, and a man with Trump’s psyche, when combined with his demagogic genius, is quite simply incompatible with liberal democratic society. Unfit. ...
I recall that when I first wrote that I didn’t believe Trump would concede an election he lost, and thereby provoke a constitutional crisis, I was also told I was hyperventilating. But it happened. And Americans rewarded it four years later by re-electing the man who tried to destroy their democracy. That’s exactly as the ancient political philosophers predicted: as democracies enter their late, chaotic stage, the people want an autocrat. They yearn for one. And in America, they voted for one twice. The forces we are up against are far beyond Trump. They’re called the cycles of history and a critical mass of the American people, who no longer want to govern themselves, who are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise. ...
Andrew Sullivan intimately knows all about not governing oneself. If only the Democrats did, who relentlessly persecuted and prosecuted Trump while in office and out. That's why we are here.
Power hungry data centers break the utility model of socializing electricity costs: Seventy percent of last year's increased electricity cost was the result of data center demand
As electric bills rise, evidence mounts that data centers share blame. States feel pressure to act
... Monitoring Analytics, the independent market watchdog for the mid-Atlantic grid, produced research in June showing that 70% — or $9.3 billion — of last year’s increased electricity cost was the result of data center demand. ...
PJM [Interconnection, the mid-Atlantic grid operator], has yet to propose ways to guarantee that data centers pay their freight, but Monitoring Analytics is floating the idea that data centers should be required to procure their own power.
In a filing last month, it said that would avoid a “massive wealth transfer” from average people to tech companies. ...
The quantity of electricity generated in the US by all sources, from natural gas to rooftop solar, rose by 3.1% in 2024 from 2023 to a record of 4,304,039 gigawatt-hours (GWh), according to data from the EIA today.
This is now clearly a breakout in demand, after 14 years of stagnation, from 2007 through 2021, when electricity users, to reduce their costs, invested in more efficient equipment – lights, appliances, electronic equipment, industrial equipment, heating and air-conditioning, etc. – and in better building insulation, shading, etc., to reduce their power costs. This relentless drive for greater efficiency kept demand roughly stable for years despite the growing economy and population. And it mired many power generators and electric utilities in a no-growth business where it was difficult to justify investment.
Now the scenario has changed, largely due to the growth in demand from data centers (AI, cloud, crypto) and the increasing penetration of EVs in the national vehicle fleet – EVs accounted for over 10% of US vehicle sales in 2024. ...
Republican Ralph Norman (SC-5), who wants to be South Carolina's next governor, says higher prices due to Trump's tariffs are for the good of the country
You be happy paying more.
... Notably, Norman was one of the few House lawmakers not to endorse Trump in 2024, backing former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley instead.
In his late July announcement of his upcoming gubernatorial bid, however, he praised Trump, predicting “what he did [in Iran] is going to put him in the annals of the greatest presidents we have ever had.” ...
More.
There are already five Republicans running for governor in South Carolina.
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