There is no negotiating with someone who says 0% is not good enough

 

Bessent: Up To 70 Nations Want To Negotiate Over Trump's Tariffs

Bob Nardelli gets it

 "The general population will not be duped by this aversion [sic; read diversion] to try and blame inflation on corporate America. It starts at the raw materials, it starts at transportation, it starts at energy," former Home Depot and Chrysler CEO Bob Nardelli said on "Cavuto: Coast to Coast" Monday. "A whole host of things that are driving this up, wage increases." ...

"This is all about, I think, trying to buy votes. This is all about an administration that is out of control," he continued. "We have a strong bias towards spending versus having a conservative policy or a sustainable future."

More.

Fox Business' broad inflation report contained an error

 Here's Megan Henney, September 29th :

An inflation measure closely watched by the Federal Reserve ticked higher in August as steep prices continue to squeeze millions of U.S. households.

The personal consumption expenditures (PCE) index showed that consumer prices rose 0.4% from the previous month, according to the Labor Department. On an annual basis, prices climbed 3.5% — up from 3.3% recorded the previous month, underscoring the challenge of taming high inflation.

She's referring to PCEPI. 

That measure isn't up from 3.3% the previous month. It's up from 3.4%, and 3.2% the month before that.

Jeff Cox at CNBC got it right, same day, as usual:

Including food and energy, headline PCE increased 0.4% on the month and 3.5% from a year ago. Headline inflation has been creeping higher in recent months after hitting 3.2% in June.

Forbes also had it right, because it actually checked the most recent data, which Fox evidently did not:

The most recent PCE price index data was released on September 29, 2023, covering the month of August. The headline August PCE inflation figure was +3.5% year over year, which was up slightly from the revised annual rate of +3.4% in July.

 

 

 

You can't get this kind of information just anywhere, and you know why

Wawa shuttering two Philadelphia stores amid city's retail crime surge:

Retail theft is up more than 50% in Philadelphia

I don't know about you, but my natural gas and electric costs are up 71% from two years ago

 Why?

Basically a combination of demand for domestic electric power production, demand for LNG exports to Europe because of the Ukraine war, low inventories headed into the winter, and fear.

Prices have quadrupled.

And Biden is considering ending all offshore drilling.

We are so screwed by these Democrat clowns.

Why Have U.S. Natural Gas Prices Soared Since 2020?

. . . natural gas production levels are at record highs, so we can’t blame a lack of production on this issue. This is from soaring demand, led in the past two years by the fastest-growing LNG export market in the world.

LOL, supply shortage hits reporting: CNBC relies on Reuters, a blog, and FOX Business for shipping container transportation costs data

 

On Oct. 7, there were reportedly around 60 container ships waiting in open water outside Los Angeles and Long Beach for berths to dock in and unload their goods. Before the pandemic, it was unusual to see even one vessel waiting for a slip. ...

Skyrocketing costs are also part of the problem. Over the past year, the cost to have one container shipped by freighter from China to the West Coast has soared from around $3,000 in Aug. 2020 to more than $20,000 in September of this year.

More.

More gaslighting: Trump's greatest economy ever is now in its 222nd month of a secular bear market

“No one had the economy that we do. We have the greatest economy that we’ve ever had.”

How come Neil Cavuto of FoxBusiness is so misinformed about the average age of US vehicles on the road?

Here:

What’s surprising right now is that while auto sales are predictably sluggish, they could be a heck of a lot worse. Auto analysts tell me that’s because the average car on the road is so old – close to nine years. Many owners have no choice but to replace their vehicles. But they’re clearly taking their time and many are waiting for just the right time, and the right sale.

Wrong Neil.

As of last August the average age was 11.4 years and climbing.

You don't go from 11.4 years to 9 years in less than a year.

If we had done so, we'd be in an economic boom right now instead of GDP in the toilet at -1.0%.

FoxBusiness Is Full Of Baloney About The Monetary Base

Throughout 2007, when the stock market reached its previous all time high in October of that year, the adjusted monetary base of the United States was very stable and averaged just $851 billion.

During the financial crisis month of September 2008, however, the base leaped up from that vicinity between September 10th and September 24th to $949 billion, and by Thanksgiving 2008 had skyrocketed all the way to $1.5 trillion, near which level it remained even as late as March 2009, when the stock market plummeted to its historic lows since 2002-2003.

The increase in the monetary base was a whopping $718 billion, most of it in response to bank failures and panic on Wall Street during a narrow window of two months in the fall of 2008, but the stock market tanked 56% from the October 2007 highs anyway by the following spring.

Now FoxBusiness is arguing, here, that the increase in the monetary base from March 2009 to today, $1.3 trillion, is somehow responsible for "juicing" the stock market's remarkable 134% rise since that low.

Nevermind the stable and relatively low monetary base had nothing to do with the 2007 highs, nor did the rapid expansion of the base by $718 billion forestall the dramatic collapse of the market in 2009, but FoxBusiness wants you to believe anyway that piling up the monetary base since March 2009 by $1.3 trillion is the reason the stock market is at its lofty heights today, $11.2 trillion higher in total market cap than in March 2009.

That's embarrassingly wrong. The expansion of the monetary base has been irrelevant to the stock market, but it is an important part of keeping the banking system solvent, which is what this entire episode has been about but no one really wants to discuss anymore even as the velocity of money makes new lows, for the obvious reason that if the banks go under, everything goes under, so ixnay on the anksbay, OK?

Have FoxBusiness And EMAC Gone Just A Little Bit Nuts?

Elizabeth MacDonald writes here that FoxBusiness has proof, proof!, that the Fed is juicing the markets.

Am I the only one who thinks this is crazy?

We're supposed to believe that the value of the total stock market is up $11.2 trillion since March 2009 because the Federal Reserve expanded the monetary base by . . . $1.2 trillion during that time?!

Talk about a money multiplier. That's a ratio of 9.3:1. Obviously the Congress should get us on this program right away. They could have taken our nearly $3 trillion in the Social Security Trust Fund and turned it into $28 trillion by now. Pikers.

ObamaCare Taxes Are In Fact New Income Taxes

The Wall Street Journal here agrees that the ObamaCare ruling has simply and incorrectly shifted government's drive for unlimited power over the people under a different part of the constitution, the taxing power, than the court had heretofore been accustomed to use, namely the commerce clause:

[Roberts'] gambit substitutes one unconstitutional expansion of government power for another and rearranges the constitutional architecture of the U.S. political system. ...

The rest of the column is a very useful and informative discussion of indirect vs. direct taxation, but it does not really make the proper equation demanded by the reasoning of the John Roberts' opinion. Since the tax penalty only arises when one fails to pay for health insurance, there is effectively no difference between the tax penalty which will have to be paid by those going without coverage and the premiums paid by those who have coverage.

Going forward under ObamaCare, if the refusal to buy health insurance results in a tax (which is in reality an unconstitutional police-power-type penalty, or fine), then the purchase of health insurance must be understood as a tax, too (penalty, fine). When the IRS comes calling, those who "gave at the office" are generally going to be treated as having already paid.

I don't think the editorial is correct to say this is somehow a new kind of tax which is really neither an income nor an excise. I think it's pretty clear that ObamaCare is a form of (increased) income taxation.

The tax penalty paid for not having insurance will be based on income. Government subsidy to purchase insurance will be based on income. Affordability of plans offered by employers will be scrutinized based on income paid to employees, and on and on. The IRS' new, main, and very intrusive interest will be in determining household income for purposes of ObamaCare compliance and participation. So it looks to me like it's all about income and comes under the income taxation umbrella, however tortured it may at first appear.

There is a longish discussion of this from the income angle by Liz MacDonald here which makes it pretty clear how everything in ObamaCare hangs on income, including this:


The percentage of income penalty rises at a lower rate than the fixed dollar amount, from 1% in 2014, to 2% in 2015, and to 2.5% in 2016 and after, and then is capped at the national average premium for what’s called “bronze” coverage, which provides the least amount of coverage under the new law, 60% before the patient must chip in for co-insurance, deductibles and co-payments.


Capping the penalty at the national average premium level for basic coverage means you're paying the basic premium. So the premium becomes a tax becomes a premium. It's all designed to fund the system, which is what taxes do. Penalties punish people for breaking the law. But lawbreakers under ObamaCare will be punished with Bronze Level Healthcare, which is why Roberts had to rewrite the law from the bench, construing the penalties as taxes, in order to save ObamaCare.

That was a political act, as The Wall Street Journal rightly goes on to say:


If this understanding is correct, then Chief Justice Roberts behaved like a politician, which is more corrosive to the rule of law and the Court's legitimacy than any abuse it would have taken from a ruling that President Obama disliked. The irony is that the Chief Justice's cheering section is praising his political skills, not his reasoning. Judges are not supposed to invent political compromises.

If anything good comes of this, maybe a new interest will develop out there to repeal the income tax once and for all as a way of getting rid of this new, very expensive and unconstitutional, monstrosity called ObamaCare.

80 Percent of Unemployment Rate Decline Due to Persons Leaving Labor Force

So says Peter Morici, quoted here by Elizabeth MacDonald at Fox Business:

“Some 80% of the reduction” in the unemployment rate from 10% hit in October 2009 to today’s 8.2% “has been from adults quitting the labor force,” says economist Peter Morici.

  

Morici adds the unemployment rate “rises to 14.5% if you factor back in those who’ve stopped looking for work but would re-enter if there were jobs, as well as part-time workers who would prefer full-time positions.” ...

The U.S. economy is creating jobs, but it is struggling, adding jobs at a rate of just 131,000 a month in 2011, which is not enough to reduce the unemployment rate.

Morici says the U.S. economy “must add 13 million jobs over the next three years -- 362,000 each month -- to bring unemployment down to 6%. GDP would have to increase at a 4% to 5% pace.”

So there you have it.

Since when does a nation’s labor force shrink during a recovery? It should not shrink, it should grow in a recovery.

"Capitalism Without Bankruptcy is like Religion Without Hell"

Barack Obama sells the former, and more recently Rob Bell the latter. A coincidence?

Seen here, concluding an interesting discussion of the cost of the auto bailouts:

Former chief executive of Eastern Airlines, Frank Borman, once said: “Capitalism without bankruptcy is like religion without hell. It doesn’t work.”

Hey! Where Are All the Anti-War Protestors, Huh?!

John Stossel would like to know (here).

Well . . . yeah!