Dow bounces 800 points Friday on encouraging inflation data after rough week: Live updates
Key Fed inflation measure shows 2.4% rate in November, lower than expected
These people are incorrigible liars.
Headline pce inflation ticked up from 2.30% year over year in October to 2.44% in November.
Core pce inflation ticked up from 2.79% year over year in October to 2.81% in November.
"We expected worse! Buy stonks!"
And so they did.
Second continuing spending resolution goes down in flames, after Elon Musk and Donald Trump said Nay to the first one, which never even came to a vote. Speaker Johnson and the Democrats had worked on that compromise deal for three months.
The roll call vote is here.
CNBC story here.
Extremely amusing.
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| The Republicans Who Said Nay |
Making chumps of us all.
President-elect Donald Trump said Thursday that Congress should get rid of the debt ceiling, a day after he came out against a deal reached by congressional lawmakers to fund the government before a shutdown occurs.
In a phone interview with NBC News, Trump said getting rid of the debt ceiling entirely would be the “smartest thing it [Congress] could do. I would support that entirely.”
“The Democrats have said they want to get rid of it. If they want to get rid of it, I would lead the charge,” Trump added.
Trump suggested that the debt ceiling is a meaningless concept — and that no one knows for sure what would happen if it were to someday be breached — “a catastrophe, or meaningless” — and no one should want to find out.
“It doesn’t mean anything, except psychologically,” he said. ...
In his call Wednesday for Republicans to ditch the negotiated bipartisan short-term spending bill, Trump also demanded that lawmakers increase the debt ceiling — something that hadn’t been on the table at all.
I can't wait for Moody's to downgrade the USA from Aaa to Aa, to make it a Trinity of lost AAA.And why not? It's only pSyChOlOgIcAl.
Those UK reporters really don't have a firm grasp of the timeline. They prefer to concentrate on the gossip and innuendo.
A particular target for the First Couple is said to be former house speaker Nancy Pelosi, who led the effort to push Biden out of the 2024 election race – personally calling him and demanding he quit in the hours before he withdrew on June 21.
More.
No one really knows what Pelosi said to Joe, or when she said it, but it wasn't on June 21 lol.
CNN reported on Wednesday July 17 (updated Thursday July 18) that Pelosi had been in California since Friday July 12, one day before Trump was shot in Butler, PA, and that she claimed she hadn't spoken to Joe Biden from July 12-17 even though CNN said it had four sources saying she had:
This phone call would mark the second known conversation
between the California lawmaker and Biden since the president’s
disastrous debate on June 27. While the exact date of the conversation
was not clear, one source described it as being within the last week.
Pelosi and Biden also spoke in early July. ...
A Pelosi spokesperson told CNN that the former House speaker has been in California since Friday and she has not spoken to Biden since.
The CNN timeline leaves room for Pelosi talking to Joe Biden as described in the story on Friday July 12, or even the day or two days before that.
CNBC reported on Sunday July 21, the day Joe dropped out, and relying on one source, that Pelosi spoke with Joe on Saturday July 20, but Pelosi's spokesman also denied this, consistent with the denial to CNN:
A spokesman for Pelosi later told CNBC after publication of this story “not true. Speaker Pelosi has not spoken to the president since she left Washington more than a week ago.”
Pelosi was in North Carolina on Saturday July 20 giving a tepid pep talk about the accomplishments of the Biden-Harris ticket:
In her roughly half-hour speech, Pelosi said the president’s name only sparsely, and primarily in reference to his role in passing legislative priorities.
3.2%, 3.4% . . . and 3.5% year over year now in November 2024.
Overall prices are up 3% yoy in November.
Wholesale prices rose 0.4% in November, more than expected:
Final-demand goods prices leaped 0.7% on the month, the biggest move since February of this year. Some 80% of the move came from a 3.1% surge in food prices, according to the BLS.
Within the food category, chicken eggs soared 54.6%, joining an across-the-board acceleration in items such as dry vegetables, fresh fruits and poultry. Egg prices at the retail level swelled 8.2% on the month and were up 37.5% from a year ago, the BLS said in a separate report Wednesday on consumer prices.
The Fed is expected still to cut again at the next meeting despite all the evidence pointing to persistently high and increasing inflation, hiding behind the skirts of fear of job losses, a smokescreen for gifting easier money to speculators, and to federal authorities who now need to finance $36.1 trillion in the national debt at lower rates.
20Y and 30Y bonds are revolting, demanding 4.624 and 4.551 as we speak, now the highest yields across the curve, as the short end yields in US Treasury bills come back down to earth.
Thank you, Chuck.
Kash Patel incoming?
Before you get your hopes up about Kash Patel's capacity to do a good job, remember Wray was also a Trump appointee to replace the fired James Comey, and he turned out arguably worse than Comey.
Robert Mueller III was appointed by George W. Bush and assumed office exactly one week before 9/11/01. Neither of them kept us safe. And then they pursued the wrong guy in the anthrax attacks.
We have more than two decades of ugly feeling about the FBI to overcome.
FBI Director Christopher Wray to resign before Trump takes office
CNN data guru reports that Americans' trust in the FBI is at its lowest point 'this century'
Rosie was on the wrong side of the trade in April 2011 when the bear went bullish. Is he again now?
He uses the same phrase, too, "not throwing in the towel", lol.
In April 2011 he claimed he wasn't throwing in the bear towel after the S&P 500 had already recovered from the 2008 debacle. Then the market slid 20% all the way to October 3, 2011, with the index falling to 1099 again, right where it was exactly three years earlier on the very same date.
It was . . . spooky!
If you had followed his take that April, you'd have lost 20% again. On top of all your losses in 2008. Ouch. Ouch.
Many of us who had kept our powder dry couldn't believe it in October 2011. We thought we were headed back to the depths of March 2009 again, too, just like the last time the market fell to 1099. I mean, that was a free-fall from there in 2008. TARP got signed in a panic that week to stop it, to no avail.
But October 2011 turned out to be more of a retest than we realized, one of the last great buying opportunities of the period. It was a brutal, crushing period of doubt, which some of us still live with.
Now it's the reverse, with unbelievable euphoria everywhere, with the S&P 500 at 6075.
A period of euphoria seems to me like a damned strange time to throw in the bear towel again, after missing out for two years by his own admission. I have no idea if Rosie is the contrary indicator he appears to be.
But the valuation of the market is pre-1920s crazy right now. It is literally not on the charts of our experience in the post-war, or even from the roaring '20s. We have GDP of $29.354 trillion, meaning a valuation of 207, when fair value has been 81 since the Great Depression.
I'm not in it, and I intend to keep staying out, because I can.
Good luck out there to those of you who go where angels fear to tread.
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| Fox News goes with Not The Suspect |
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| Not The Suspect |
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| The Suspect |
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| CNBC Goes with Not The Suspect |
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| NYPost goes with Not The Suspect |
Yeah, and the preferred gauge is core dammit, 2.8%, not the headline 2.3%.
Fed’s preferred inflation gauge rises to 2.3% annually, meeting expectations
We have been range-bound since April, averaging 2.7% year over year for six months.
The Fed is making ZERO progress, and yet . . .
... traders increased their bets that the Fed would approve another rate cut in December.
Ken Griffin just hates tariffs, which funded the (necessarily very small) federal government until the 20th century.
Meanwhile he's afraid the 12,000 lobbyists which already populate Washington procuring handouts like the Chips Act's billions of dollars for businesses will be replaced with 12,000 other ones lobbying for something else, ROFLMAO.
Citadel’s Ken Griffin says Trump’s tariffs could lead to crony capitalism
“I am gravely concerned that the rise of tariffs puts us on a
slippery slope towards crony capitalism,” the billionaire investor said
Thursday at the Economic Club of New York. ...
“Those same companies that enjoy that momentary sugar rush of having their competitors removed from the battlefield, soon become complacent, soon take for granted their newfound economic superiority, and frankly, they become less competitive on both the world stage and less competitive at meeting the needs of the American consumer,” Griffin said at the event. ...
“Now you’re going to find the halls of Washington really filled with the special interest groups and the lobbyists as people look for continued higher and higher tariffs to keep away foreign competition, and to protect inefficient American businesses have failed to meet the needs of the American consumer,” Griffin said.
“There is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle, thus I’ll be withdrawing my name from consideration to serve as Attorney General,” he said.
More.
The attack comes two days after Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a revised nuclear doctrine that formally lowers the threshold for the country’s use of nuclear weapons. Ukraine on Tuesday fired several American-supplied longer-range missiles and reportedly fired U.K.-made Storm Shadows on Wednesday into Russia. ...
The developments come as the war has taken on a growing international dimension with the arrival of North Korean troops to help Russia on the battlefield — a development that U.S. officials said prompted U.S. President Joe Biden’s policy shift on allowing Ukraine to fire longer-range U.S. missiles into Russia. The Kremlin responded with threats to escalate further.
“If every country is looking equally irresponsible, then the chances of [a US budget crisis] happening are slim, certainly on a sustainable basis. But when all the countries are experiencing high debt ratios and high deficits, then it′s less likely because in effect there is nowhere to run, with the possible exception of physical assets like gold.” ...
“It would take another country, another region like the euro area supplanting the U.S. with regard to fiscal responsibility. That’s tough to see happening,” he added.
More.
“In 2023, Hegseth paid the complainant as part of a civil
confidential settlement agreement and maintains his innocence,” Timothy
Parlatore, Hegseth’s attorney, said in a statement.
He also denied that the encounter between Hegseth and an unnamed woman, which she alleges happened in 2017, was sexual assault. ...
Parlatore denied the allegation, saying, “This is a situation where a consensual encounter occurred and, unfortunately, the woman had to come up with a lie to explain why the woman had not come back to her husband’s room that night.”
His Wikipedia entry indicates he cheated on his second! wife sometime in 2016 with Fox executive producer Jennifer Rauchet who had his baby in August 2017. By October 2017 he's cheating on her! with a married woman! also supposedly conservative! referenced in the confidential settlement by CNBC:
Hegseth and his first wife, Meredith Schwarz, divorced in 2009.
He married his second wife, Samantha Deering, in 2010; they have three children.
In August 2017, while still married to Deering, Hegseth had a daughter with Fox executive producer Jennifer Rauchet, with whom he was having an extramarital relationship.[25] He and Deering divorced in August 2017.
Hegseth and Rauchet, who has three young children from her first marriage, married in August 2019.[69]
Hegseth lives in Tennessee. He is a member of Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship,[70] a church in the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches.[71][72]
In October 2017, a 30-year-old conservative group staffer accused Hegseth of sexually assaulting her in a hotel room after he spoke at a California Federation of Republican Women event in Monterey, California.[73] She went to an emergency room the next day for a rape kit test.[74] Hegseth described the allegations as a "he-said, she-said" dispute about a consensual encounter.[75] No charges were filed in the case.[73] Hegseth paid the accuser as part of a non-disclosure agreement in 2020.[76]
CNBC: Wholesale prices rose 0.2% in October, in line with expectations
Wholesale prices nudged higher in October, though largely in line with expectations and mostly consistent with the Federal Reserve cutting interest rates again in December, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Thursday.
The producer price index, which measures what producers get for their products, increased a seasonally adjusted 0.2% for the month, up one-tenth of a percentage point from September though matching the Dow Jones consensus forecast. On a 12-month basis, headline wholesale inflation was at 2.4%.
Excluding food and energy, core PPI rose 0.3%, also one-tenth more than September and also matching expectations. The 12-month rate was at 3.1%.
"Largely in line" and "mostly consistent" lol. Both 12-month measures were higher than the consensus expected, which was 2.3% for headline and 3% for core. The year over year measures are the most important anyway, especially core.
Why lie about it?
CNN: Wholesale inflation heated up again last month, reversing recent progress
US wholesale inflation picked up more than expected in October, indicating that some price pressures persist at the producer level.
The Producer Price Index, a measurement of average price changes seen by producers and manufacturers, rose 0.2% on a monthly basis and 2.4% for the 12 months ended in October, marking an acceleration from September, when prices ticked up 0.1% for the month and grew 1.9% annually, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data released Thursday. ...
FactSet consensus forecasts called for a 0.2% monthly gain and for the annual rate to heat up to 2.3%.
Excluding food and energy prices, which tend to be volatile, core PPI rose 0.3% on a monthly basis, marking an acceleration from 0.2% in September. Annually, core PPI heated up from 2.9% to 3.1%, the largest increase since June. Economists projected a 0.2% monthly gain and a 3% annual rate.
Obviously not all prediction models were the same. FactSet projected a 0.2% monthly gain for core vs. 0.3% for core shown above by FXStreet.
But again, the year over year is up MORE THAN EXPECTED for BOTH measures in most models. CNN mentions it, CNBC does not.
You can clearly observe that overall, headline wholesale prices year over year have been trending higher since June 2023. That bottom came out in July 2023, when the Fed last hiked the interest rate in the current cycle and then paused for good.
That was a big mistake.
The rise in wholesale prices since then is as good an indicator as any that higher inflation is deeply embedded in the economy and that the Fed stopped hiking too soon. Arguably core prices sent the same signal, but not starting until after December 2023.
Paying attention to core could explain the Fed's mistake, but for the fact that if the Fed were truly listening to this information, it wouldn't have then cut by 50 basis points in September 2024. I mean, c'mon man.
Jay Powell represents the interests of the bankers and Wall Street, for whom inflation is a good thing because it is the screen behind which the pipeline from prices to profits gets juiced.
He does not represent the people.
Who appointed that guy anyway?!
On Thursday, an attorney for the woman who alleges she had a sexual relationship with Gaetz when she was a minor said the Ethics panel should release the report.
“Mr. Gaetz’s likely nomination as Attorney General is a perverse development in a truly dark series of events. We would support the House Ethics Committee immediately releasing their report,” John Clune, a partner at Hutchinson Black and Cook, wrote on X.
“She was a high school student and there were witnesses,” the lawyer added.
Trump picks vaccine skeptic RFK Jr. for Health and Human Services secretary
Kennedy, in a post on X, thanked Trump and wrote, “I’m committed to advancing your vision to Make America Healthy Again.” ...
Andrea Ducas, vice president of health policy for the advocacy group Center for American Progress, in a statement called Trump’s choice of Kennedy “nothing short of disastrous for the country.”
“His track record and open skepticism of longstanding medical science could jeopardize the incredible public health gains we’ve accomplished as a nation – including the gains we’ve made in combatting infectious disease through childhood vaccination programs and in making our food supply safer through pasteurization,” Ducas said.
Sure, sure it is.
House Speaker Mike Johnson revealed at a news conference Wednesday evening that Gaetz had submitted his resignation from Congress. The resignation will not take effect until it is announced on the House floor. ...
Gaetz has been the subject of a House Ethics Committee investigation into whether he engaged in sexual misconduct or illicit drug use. ...
Punchbowl News reported Wednesday that his resignation came just two days before the panel was set to vote on releasing a report on its probe. ...
Asked by a HuffPost reporter whether Gaetz has the character to be attorney general, Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, replied, “Are you s------- me?”
-- CNBC, here
This is some crazy shit.
Well whoop-de-do!
They're flying off the shelf lol.
Lucid Group stock ended 2020 at about ten bucks a share, popped above $50 a couple of times in 2021, and is now worth $2.30 lol.
The company’s net loss for the third quarter widened to $992.5 million. That compares to a loss of $630.9 million a year earlier.
Lucid CEO Peter Rawlinson described the quarter as a “landmark” for
the company, citing record deliveries of 2,781 units as well as
cost-cutting measures. He also noted that the company hit financial and
production targets. ...
The company reaffirmed plans to produce roughly 9,000 vehicles this year, which would mark a 6.8% increase compared to 8,428 units in 2023. ...
Lucid’s stock has been under pressure this year amid widening losses, slower-than-expected sales and significant cash burn.
More.
The electric vehicle idiots running this company into the ground should all be fired. Just build reliable combustion engine SUVs people can afford and don't start on fire while parked in the garage.
How hard can it be?
Reported here in September:
Jeep’s U.S. sales have plummeted 34% from an all-time high of more than 973,000 SUVs sold in 2018 to less than 643,000 units last year. While most auto brands increased sales last year, Jeep was off by about 6%.
The most recent declines follow the company ending production last year of the entry-level Renegade and the Cherokee compact SUV — two mainstream models with peak U.S. sales of around 300,000 units annually from 2016 to 2019. ...
Jeep also is attempting to increase the quality and reliability of its vehicles, which have historically ranked below average in third-party rankings. ... Jeep on Monday confirmed it is cooperating with U.S. auto safety regulators on an investigation into more than 781,000 newer Jeep Wrangler and Gladiator SUVs after reports of underhood fires.
Reported here yesterday:
Automaker Stellantis announced plans Wednesday to cut a manufacturing shift and indefinitely lay off roughly 1,100 workers at a Jeep plant in Ohio.
The company, which has been battling high inventory levels and lower earnings this year, said the decision at its Toledo South Assembly Plant to cut production to one shift will better align output with demand of the Jeep Gladiator pickup — the factory’s sole product.
