Despite his denials last year, Trump's Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was friendly with Jeffrey Epstein in 2012 even though he claimed to have shunned him since 2005

 https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/30/us/howard-lutnick-epstein-island.html

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick Planned Trip to Epstein’s Island

 

It's nearly noon and this chart of core personal consumption expenditures still isn't updated with the data due out today because the Department of Commerce which oversees the BEA is now run by the incompetent Howard Lutnick

 CNBC usually runs a big story on core personal consumption expenditures before 9:00 AM every month when this report comes out, but not now under Howard Lutnick.

 

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is the Trump administration sycophant who tells Trump whatever he wants to hear

 

 Reported here:

... On the other side are Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and senior adviser Peter Navarro, the latter a long-time tariff evangelist.

Navarro has described the administration as operating in harmony, quoting the 2002 film Drumline: 'One band, one sound.'

'We are the greatest economic team and April 2nd will be a historic day for American workers,' Lutnick said. 

But others inside the administration are less certain of Lutnick's motivations.

'He goes into the Oval and tells the president whatever he wants to hear,' said one Trump ally, calling Lutnick a 'f***ing nightmare' who backs Trump's instincts without considering broader consequences. 

Lutnick's influence appears to be growing, even as concerns mount that his approach is untethered from policy grounding.

As the April 2 deadline looms, inflation continues to rise, according to new Commerce Department data released on Friday - even before the new tariffs take effect. ...

 

Biden-Harris administration buys votes in North Carolina using the fascist Chips Act just in time for the election

 CNBC doesn't even hide the fact.

Biden administration to provide $750 million to North Carolina-based Wolfspeed for advanced computer chips

The Biden-Harris administration announced plans Tuesday to provide up to $750 million in direct funding to Wolfspeed, with the money supporting its new silicon carbide factory in North Carolina that makes the wafers used in advanced computer chips and its factory in Marcy, New York.

Wolfspeed’s use of silicon carbide enables the computer chips used in electric vehicles and other advanced technologies to be more efficient. The North Carolina-based company’s two projects are estimated to create 2,000 manufacturing jobs as part of a more than $6 billion expansion plan. ...

The new Wolfspeed facility in Siler City could be a critical symbol in this year’s election, as it opened earlier this year in a swing state county that is undergoing rapid economic expansion in large part due to incentives provided by the Biden-Harris administration. ...

Wolfspeed CEO Gregg Lowe told The Associated Press that the United States currently produces 70% of the world’s silicon carbide — and that the investments will help the country preserve its lead as China ramps up efforts in the sector.

Lowe said “we’re very happy with this grant” and that the Commerce Department staff awarding funds from the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act was “terrific.”

In the good old days the Republican fascists funded domestic companies, now the Democrat fascists fund the foreign companies

 Taiwan last week, South Korea this week.

The Biden administration has reached an agreement to provide up to $6.4 billion in direct funding for Samsung Electronics to develop a computer chip manufacturing and research cluster in Texas.

The funding announced Monday by the Commerce Department is part of a total investment in the cluster that, with private money, is expected to exceed $40 billion. The government support comes from the CHIPS and Science Act, which President Joe Biden signed into law in 2022 with the goal of reviving the production of advanced computer chips domestically.

More.

 

Clueless AP article calls US economy resilient when it's been in the rut they fear is coming since 2007

The compound annual growth rate of real GDP since 2007 has been WORSE than for the same time frame of the Great Depression, yet AP is completely oblivious. The upside is when things really go to hell they'll still be.

As global economic picture dims, solutions seem out of reach:

Barely a year after most of the world’s major countries were enjoying an unusual moment of shared prosperity, the global economy may be at risk of returning to the rut it tumbled into after the financial crisis of 2007-2009. ...

The U.S. economy, now enjoying a record-breaking 10-year expansion, still shows resilience. American consumers, whose spending accounts for 70% of U.S. economic activity, have driven the growth.

Retail sales have risen sharply so far this year, with people shopping online and spending more at restaurants. Their savings rates are also the highest since 2012, which suggests that consumers aren’t necessarily stretching themselves too thin, according to the Commerce Department.

The unending fascination of Sarah Palin for little Democrat minds

Dunderhead Democrat Party hack William Daley is stuck on stupid.

Here he is in full flutter in WaPo, like a moth drawn to a lightbulb, typing "The GOP’s dysfunction all started with Sarah Palin". It proves nothing but that it takes a dunderhead to know a dunderhead. The GOP has failed, he says, to distance itself from this simpleton who flunked Newspapers 101, and her ilk. Reading it one wonders when Democrats will distance themselves from ignoramuses like Bill Daley, but then you realize they're all ignoramuses. Where would they go?

Certainly not Chicago.  

Bill Daley, it must remembered, comes from the same Democrat family which presided over the decades long ruination of the finances of that once great city, and with it of the state. The place is now so bankrupt it can't even pay lottery winners. Those who can flee the state, do. Illinois ranks first in America for out-migration in 2014. These nincompoop Daleys are the same people who seriously thought they could afford to host the Summer Olympics next year, forgetting how all those $100,000+ pensions for unionized teachers can really add up. As it is Chicago's bonds have this year achieved junk status, despite the highest sales taxes in the nation and the highest property taxes of any state, save New Jersey. The place is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy because of perennially spendthrift Democrats.

In charge of the Department of Commerce under Bill Clinton, Bill Daley long ago proved his own incompetence. The man couldn't even manage to find a staffer at the Bureau of Economic Analysis to give him the correct figure for year 1900 gross domestic product in a 1999 speech commemorating the invention of the metric under FDR. Daley was only off by an order of magnitude and fifty years at the time, saying the year 1900 $20 billion economy was actually $300 billion in size, a level which it did not reach . . . until 1950! Bill Daley only ran the place. You'd think he could at least get its monthly claim to headline fame right.

But Democrats have good reason to forget the size of things, especially GDP. After all under them it took eleven long years to restore the 1929 $100 billion economy back to its size, in 1940. And presently the chief Democrat holding a veto pen in one hand and a copy of Rules for Radicals in the other is on schedule to produce the very worst GDP record since that Great Depression.

At least Sarah Palin has learned a few things along the way since her quixotic candidacy, for example rejecting the appropriateness of bailouts and crony capitalism. Democrats on the other hand have learned nothing, and only keep repeating the mistakes of the past.

The global oil war just got even more interesting: Dept. of Commerce relaxes export ban

With a tip o' the hat to Andrew Critchlow at the UK Telegraph, Reuters reported just a couple of hours ago that the US Dept. of Commerce has announced relaxation of some parts of the 1974 US oil export ban, here:

(Reuters) - The Obama administration has opened a new front in the global battle for oil market share, effectively clearing the way for the shipment of as much as a million barrels per day of ultra-light U.S. crude to the rest of the world.

The Department of Commerce on Tuesday ended a year-long silence on a contentious, four-decade ban on oil exports, saying it had begun approving a backlog of requests to sell processed light oil abroad. It also issued a long-awaited document outlining exactly what kinds of oil other would-be exporters can ship. ...

... the impending swell of U.S. petroleum into global markets may intensify what many analysts say is a pivotal oil market war, with Saudi Arabia and the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) unwilling to yield ground. Now they will face even greater competition beyond U.S. shores.

Rush Limbaugh Finds A GDP Conspiracy Where There Is None

When it comes to numbers, I have observed that Rush Limbaugh can be counted on to get something horribly wrong, and today was no exception. Today he has misrepresented the routine revision of the GDP data every five years as a revision of the numbers for only the last five years, as if it were designed specifically to make Obama look better. In actual fact, the revision of the numbers goes back not five years, but all the way back to 1929.

Truly incredible, and embarrassing in the extreme, since the truth is the revision occurs every five years, and this is the 14th revision in the series. This is why conservatives hope Rush retires soon, nevermind why liberals hope he retires. He's making us all look stupid when he carries on like this.

I have shown "five" in red below from today's Rush transcript so you can appreciate the thorough-going depth of Rush's misrepresentation of the facts: 

RUSH:  Here's what the Commerce Department is doing. 

They have "made changes to how it calculates gross domestic product," going back five years. "At the same time, the government also went back and revised data for the past five years, to reflect more complete as well as additional statistics from a variety of sources, such as the Internal Revenue Service and the US Department of Agriculture." They have made changes to how they're calculating the gross domestic product, or economic growth, and what they're doing now is they're going back five years. 

They have revised data for the past five years to, they say, "reflect a more complete, as well as additional statistics from a variety of sources, such as the IRS and the Department of Agriculture.  Why do you think they decided to go back the last five years to revise data?  To rewrite the horrible 4-1/2 years of Obama.  There's no question.  I don't know if it's fraudulent, but they're cooking the books -- and after cooking the books, after making it look as good as they can, it's 1.7% economic growth.

Here, however, is the statement from the BEA in today's official release about the routine revision every five years, which has been telegraphed to every reader of BEA GDP reports for many quarters running going back at least to last year (meaning Rush Limbaugh has never read even cursorily a single one of those GDP reports from the BEA in the interim, let alone today's):

Today, BEA released revised statistics of gross domestic product (GDP) and of other national income and product accounts (NIPAs) series from 1929 through the first quarter of 2013. Comprehensive revisions, which are carried out about every 5 years, are an important part of BEA's regular process for improving and modernizing its accounts to keep pace with the ever-changing U.S. economy.

-----------------------------------

1.7% GDP in Q2 2013 is horrible enough, but the average report for the last three quarters comes in under 1%, 0.966% to be exact. So if there is some conspiracy to make things look better than they are, whoever's in charge of that ought to be fired, stat!

This country remains in deep trouble, and there is no conspiracy to hide it. 

I'm Nominating This One For Blown Prediction of 2011

As seen here:

Retail consultancy Customer Growth Partners expects that American consumers have worked to put their finances in order and are ready to spend. Their forecast calls for holiday sales in the November to December period to rise 6.5 percent from last year to $554 billion.

That's twice consensus forecasts, which have put holiday sales growth between 2.5 percent to 3 percent. It also is the fastest pace for retail sales growth since 2004, when holiday sales rose 6.9 percent.

Why is this a crazy prediction? Because Whirlpool announced today that it is laying off 5,000 as consumers are unable to buy major appliances.

And because of this, reported here in the same place, also today:

The total compensation paid by employers in the third quarter rose by the smallest amount since at least 1982 as employees paid for a greater portion of their health care and companies continued to sit on their record hoards of cash. ...

Meanwhile, the savings rate plummeted to 3.6 percent, the lowest in four years, according to separate data released Friday from the Commerce Department. That’s down from 5.3 percent in June.

“Spending more when you’re taking home less and cutting into savings — That’s not the best recipe for stronger spending in the near term," Jonathan Basile, an economist for Credit Suisse, wrote in a note to clients.

Consumers remain under stress just to pay the bills, and are reducing savings to cope. That is not a recipe for a smashing holiday spending season.

GDP REVISED DOWN FOR Q1 2010 TO 2.7% FROM 3.0%

According to The Associated Press:

Gross domestic product rose by an annual rate of 2.7 percent in the January-to-March period, the Commerce Department said Friday. That was less than the 3 percent estimate for the quarter that the government released last month. It was also much slower than the 5.6 percent pace in the previous quarter.

The Corpse is Sitting Up

After applying the paddles of $trillions of bailouts, stimulus spending, and backstops, the preliminary report of Q4 GDP comes in at 5.7%, but is already more like 2.3% after deducting 3.39 points for falling inventories. Who knows what the final number will look like after the customary revisions. But one thing is already clear: 2009 overall marked the worst year of economic contraction since 1946. And the doctors, the taxpayers, aren't likely to stay in the ER indefinitely.

The story is from Reuters:

The U.S. economy grew at a faster-than-expected 5.7 percent pace in the fourth quarter, the quickest in more than six years, as businesses made less-aggressive cuts to inventories and stepped up spending.

The Commerce Department said on Friday its first estimate put fourth-quarter gross domestic product growth at its fastest pace since the third quarter of 2003. The economy expanded at a 2.2 percent annual rate in the third quarter. . . .

Business inventories fell only $33.5 billion in fourth quarter after dropping $139.2 billion in the July-September period. The change in inventories alone added 3.39 percentage points to GDP in the last quarter. This was the biggest percentage contribution since the fourth quarter of 1987.

For the whole of 2009, the economy contracted 2.4 percent, the biggest decline since 1946, the first year after the end of World War II.

Go here for the whole thing.

Sham Economy, Part Three

In late October the government reported that third quarter GDP came in at 3.5%, about half of which was attributed widely to stimulus schemes like the first time home buyer credit and the cash for clunkers program.

Then the first revision brought the "growth" down to 2.8%. Today the Associated Press is reporting that the final revision brings third quarter growth down to 2.2%, which means that the economy, minus the hundreds of $billions in other stimulus spending, may actually have contracted in the third quarter, meaning "the recession" hadn't ended yet:

The economy grew at a 2.2 percent pace in the third quarter, as the recovery got off to a weaker start than previously thought. ...

The Commerce Department's new reading on gross domestic product for the July-to-September quarter was slower than the 2.8 percent growth rate estimated just a month ago. Economists were predicting that figure wouldn't be revised in the government's final estimate on third-quarter GDP.

You mean the same economists who warned us so long in advance of last year's financial tsunami?

The stuff they ladle out in this soup line we're standing in comes out of a crock of you know what.