Showing posts with label CNBC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CNBC. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 3, 2025
TACO Trump strikes again
Trump always chickens out, aka paper tiger, etc.
Social Security recipients do not need to worry about their benefits being garnished due to their defaulted student loans, at least for now. The development is an abrupt change in policy by the administration, which had announced in April that it would be resuming collection activity on defaulted student loan borrowers. The Education Dept. had said that Social Security benefit offsets could begin as early as June.
(June 3) Deutsche Bank raises S&P 500 forecast on ‘TACO’ theory: ‘We will get further relents’
(May 29) 10 times Trump has threatened, then backtracked on, tariffs as 'TACO trade' jab gains traction
(May 31) Trump Raises Steel Tariffs To 50%—Here Are The 21 Times He’s Changed His Mind
(May 28) Trump was asked about the "TACO" trade and called it a "nasty question." Here's what it means.
(The guy who started TACO May 2) The US market’s surprise comeback, and the rise of the ‘Taco’ trade theory
... the US administration does not have a very high tolerance for market and economic pressure, and will be quick to back off when tariffs cause pain. This is the Taco theory: Trump Always Chickens Out. ...
Thursday, May 29, 2025
CNBC avoids the story like the plague: Real GDP for 1Q2025 was revised up to -0.2% from -0.3% in today's second estimate for 1Q
No one wants to talk about this. Crickets pretty much everywhere. CNBC had Rosie on to discuss, but there was no article.
We've been liberated from Liberation Day by two Republicans (one appointed by Trump) and one Democrat on a court handpicked by Trump to adjudicate his tariffs lol
The U.S. Court of International Trade on Wednesday blocked steep reciprocal tariffs unilaterally imposed by President Donald Trump on scores of countries in April to correct what he said were persistent trade imbalances. ...
In its ruling, a three-judge panel on the Court of International Trade said that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which Trump invoked to impose the tariffs, does not authorize a president to levy universal duties on imports.“The Worldwide and Retaliatory Tariff Orders exceed any authority
granted to the President by IEEPA to regulate importation by means of
tariffs,” the judges wrote.
And separate, specific tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China related to drug trafficking “fail because they do not deal with the threats set forth in those orders,” the panel wrote.
Implementing tariffs typically requires congressional approval.
But Trump chose to bypass Congress by declaring a national economic emergency under IEEPA, which became law in 1977, and then using the purported emergency as justification for cutting Congress out of the process.
The panel not only ordered a permanent halt to the tariffs at issue in the case, but it also barred any future modifications to them.
The Trump administration was given 10 days to make the necessary changes to carry out the judges’ orders. ...
Wednesday, May 28, 2025
CNBC piles on Elon Musk with unfair story about latest test flight of Starship, which was hardly a setback
SpaceX saw its Starship system explode on Tuesday in a test flight, the third consecutive setback for Elon Musk’s rocket maker.
There's a far less biased presentation here:
The lead actor in the sequel to the Grace Commission didn't realize it was just a show
... “I was, like, disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly,
which increases the budget deficit, not just decrease it, and
undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” Musk said in a clip the program shared on social media platform X. ... “I think a bill can be big or it could be beautiful, but I don’t know if it could be both,” Musk said in the clip. ...
In an interview with The Washington Post published Tuesday, Musk said that the federal bureaucracy is “much worse than I realized” and that DOGE became “the whipping boy for everything.”
Sunday, May 25, 2025
Canes mortui sunt
Russia hits Ukraine with the largest drone-and-missile attack of the war so far, killing at least 12
... The scale of the onslaught was stunning — Russia hit Ukraine with 367
drones and missiles, making this the largest single aerial attack of
the more than three-years-long war, according to Yuriy Ihnat, a
spokesperson for Ukraine’s Air Force.
In all, Russia used 69 missiles of various types and 298 drones, including Iranian-designed Shahed drones, he told The Associated Press. ...
Ivan Fedorenko, 80, said he regrets letting their two dogs into the house after the air raid siren went off. “They burned to death,” he said. “I want to bury them, but I’m not allowed yet.” ...
Thursday, May 22, 2025
Paper tiger Donald Trump March 2018: I will never sign another bill like this again
He's signed them ever since lol. Nothing's changed.
Trump signs $1.3 trillion spending bill into law despite being ‘unhappy’ about it
... Trump slammed the rushed process to pass the more than 2,200-page bill released only Wednesday. Standing near the pile of documents, the president said he was “disappointed” in the legislation and would “never sign another bill like this again.” ...
House GOP votes for tax breaks for rich Democrats from Blue states like New York, New Jersey, and California lol
... Enacted via the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, or TCJA, of 2017, there’s currently a $10,000 limit
on the SALT deduction, and raising that cap has been a priority for
certain House lawmakers in high-tax states like New York, New Jersey and
California. Filers must itemize deductions to claim the tax break for
SALT.
If the House provision is enacted, the SALT cap would rise to $40,000, up from $30,000 in the previous plan, and phases out over $500,000, according to revised language released by the House Rules Committee. The provision would go into effect in 2025. ...
“Any changes to lift the cap would primarily benefit higher earners,” Garrett Watson, director of policy analysis at the Tax Foundation, wrote in an analysis on Tuesday.
With an income phaseout over $400,000, the top 20% of taxpayers “would be the only group to meaningfully benefit,” Watson wrote. ...
Wednesday, May 21, 2025
Democrat US House math suffers another blow: Gerald E. Connolly (VA-11) succumbs to cancer at age 75
CNBC reported here.
House Democrats will now have three vacancies and a caucus of 212 vs. 220 for the GOP.
Representatives Turner (TX-18) and Grijalva (AZ-7) died in March.
Friday, May 16, 2025
USA loses last AAA rating, from Moody's, perfectly timed for after GOP can't move a budget out of committee lol
Moody’s downgrades U.S. credit rating, citing rise in government debt
... Moody’s had been a holdout in keeping U.S. sovereign debt at the
highest credit rating possible, and brings the 116-year-old agency into
line with its rivals. Standard & Poor’s downgraded the U.S. to AA+
from AAA in August 2011, and Fitch Ratings also cut the U.S. rating to
AA+ from AAA, in August 2023.
“Successive U.S. administrations and Congress have failed to agree on
measures to reverse the trend of large annual fiscal deficits and
growing interest costs,” Moody’s analysts said in a statement. “We do
not believe that material multi-year reductions in mandatory spending
and deficits will result from current fiscal proposals under
consideration.” ...
“... we expect federal deficits to widen, reaching nearly 9% of GDP by 2035, up from 6.4% in 2024, driven mainly by increased interest payments on debt, rising entitlement spending and relatively low revenue generation,” Moody’s said. ″We anticipate that the federal debt burden will rise to about 134% of GDP by 2035, compared to 98% in 2024.″ ...
Moody’s officially rated U.S. bonds in 1993 for the first time, but had assigned a “country ceiling rating” of Aaa on the U.S. since 1949.
It's driving the Reuters writer of this story at CNBC crazy that US Treasury securities aren't selling off lol
... Holdings of U.S. Treasuries surged to $9.05 trillion in March, an
all-time peak and up more than $233 billion from $8.81 trillion in
February. Compared with a year earlier, Treasuries owned by foreigners
rose nearly 12%.
Some analysts said that trend could change in April as the Trump administration introduced a massive trade shock on April 2nd that saw effective tariff rates surge, particularly on Chinese goods.
That fueled a U.S. Treasuries sell-off that, at one point, pushed benchmark 10-year yields more than 70 basis points (bps) higher to nearly 4.6% over the April 3-11 period. The selloff may have included selling from foreign investors, analysts said.
Trump has since paused the imposition of tariffs for 90 days, and the Treasuries market has stabilized somewhat, although foreign investors are likely to have remained leery of U.S. assets. ...
Yeah, I don't think so.
10Y yield averaged 4.28 in April lol, unchanged from March lololol.
The slavish respect for the consensus estimates for inflation and everything else vs. the actual levels viewed historically is as nutty as anything promoted in partisan politics
Consumer sentiment slides to second-lowest on record as inflation expectations jump after tariffs
... Recent inflation data has not shown a tariff bump, as both the consumer price index and producer price index for April came in below consensus estimates. ...
Who gives a damn about whether the consensus estimates got it right or not? What matters is what the damn rates are!
And the rates are much higher when compared with the immediate pre-pandemic rates.
Would those have come down in recent months without the spectre of a Trump tariff regime looming in the wings?
Well we'll never know, now will we?
It's all so infuriatingly stupid.
Meanwhile consumer sentiment and surveys of same don't hold much water with me.I conclude only one thing from them: that our tolerance for inflation has weakened dramatically. We were a much hardier people in the past, and now we are soft and melt like snowflakes at the slightest hint of bad news.
In November 1974 cpi inflation peaked at 12.2% year over year. The then Michigan survey of consumer sentiment plunged to 57.6 by February 1975.
But in April 2025 cpi inflation is only 2.3% year over year, and the Michigan survey has dropped to 50.8 from 52.2 in April.
It's comic.
Howard Gleckman of Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center likes House GOP $4,000 senior citizen deduction better than Trump's elimination of taxes on Social Security benefits
How House GOP bill’s $4,000 senior ‘bonus’ compares to eliminating tax on Social Security benefits
... A median income retiree who brings in up to about $50,000 annually may see their taxes cut by a little less than $500 per year with this change, noted Howard Gleckman, senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.
“It’s not nothing, but it’s also not life changing,” Gleckman said.
The $4,000 senior “bonus” deduction would help lower-income people and would not help higher-income individuals who are above the phase outs, Gleckman said.
In contrast, the proposal to eliminate taxes on Social Security benefits would have been a “big windfall” for high-income taxpayers, he said.
“If you feel like you need to provide an extra benefit to retirees, this is clearly a better way to do it than the original Social Security proposal that Trump had,” Gleckman said. ...
Thursday, May 15, 2025
We'll probably never know whether weak Russian invasion of Ukraine headlines like these at CNBC contributed to Trump's thinking that Ukraine started it
Shrinking from calling what Russia did an invasion was a temporary flight from reality for CNBC, probably motivated by keeping people from panicking and selling stocks.
It's all about the money, for Trump no less than for CNBC. And also for Vladimir Putin.
It should be about something else.
Monday, May 12, 2025
No DOGE savings show up in April US Treasury Statement of Receipts and Outlays of the Federal Government, but higher deficits sure do, $194 billion higher year to date than last year
Fiscal 2025 deficit, October-April: $1.049 trillion
Fiscal 2024 deficit, October-April: $0.855 trillion
Increase in the deficit in 2025 Oct-Apr: $194 billion
Meanwhile CNBC blows smoke up your ass:
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)