Trump nukes $6.6 trillion from the stock market in the last two days with tariff announcement, the biggest 2-day wipeout in history, $11.1 trillion since the inauguration

 

Reported here:

Roughly $11.1 trillion has been wiped away from the U.S. stock market since Jan. 17, the Friday before President Donald Trump took the oath of office and began his second term, according to data from Dow Jones Market Data.

Some $6.6 trillion of that figure was lost on Thursday and Friday alone — the largest two-day wipeout of shareholder value on record, Dow Jones data showed. ...

Elon Musk hasn't saved the taxpayers anything, year-to-date spending is actually 7.4% higher in 2025 than in 2024

 Reported here:

... The Hamilton Project, an economic policy think tank, tracks federal spending using daily treasury statements published by the government.

These data show that the federal government had spent $1.893 trillion in 2025 as of March 26, compared to $1.763 trillion at the same date last year. In other words, federal spending in on pace to come in 7.4% higher this year than last. ...

 

Rosie throws in the towel and BlackRock declares the boom and bust cycle over

 Gee, when have we heard that before lol?

Ford Motor F-150 Lightning EV pick-em-up-truck sales are a JOKE, and the mainstream media propaganda stories don't tell you that, if they cover the story at all

  Ford sold 7,162 units of the Lightning in Q3 2024, up from the 3,503 units in Q3 of last year. ... Year-to-date, Ford sold 22,807 F-150 Lightning EVs. ... 

[22,807 units lol. Ford sold nearly 751,000 F-series pick up trucks in 2023, so that's like 3% of the 2023 total]

Overall, Ford’s all-electric vehicle sales in the third quarter of this year amounted to 23,509 units, up 12.2% from last year’s 20,962 vehicles. Year-to-date, Ford sold 67,689 EVs, up 45% compared to last year’s 46,671 units. ...

Ford sold 432,429 combustion-powered vehicles in the third quarter, down 2.8% year-over-year, and 1,340,139 units year-to-date, down 1.8% year-over-year.

Reported here. 

That means year-to-date total EV sales are just 5.05% of total combustion-powered vehicle sales year to date.

People aren't buying these dogs.

None of these stories mention these facts.

CBS: Ford to pause production of F-150 Lightning electric pickup trucks

CNBC: Ford to halt production of electric F-150 Lightning next month until January

MarketWatch: Ford to Pause Production of F-150 Lightning EV Pickup Trucks

Reuters, to it's credit actually reported some actual numbers: Ford to halt production of F-150 Lightning EV pickup trucks for six weeks :

Ford said this month its Ford-brand U.S. EV sales are up 45% this year and sales of F-150 Lightning more than doubled to 7,100 in the three months ending Sept. 30 - thought [sic] they still represent just 3.6% of all F-Series pickup sales.     

If Ford is smart it will abandon this boondoggle which is going to cost it $5 billion plus in 2024 and even more going forward and just stick with hybrids and hope Donald Trump fixes this mess.

$11 billion fraudster Caroline Ellison got 2 years in jail, Colorado county clerk gets 9 years for breaching voting systems

 It's good to be a Democrat.

 

What is profit gauging?

 I think he means gouging.

Biden sharpens attack on profit gauging...

Bezos already lives there

 BEZOS: WE'LL ALL LIVE IN OUTERSPACE...

Total BS story about deposit flight contains zero evidence for the claim

 

Two conditions need to develop before buying bonds

. . . the trend in the bond market . . . still looks bearish. ...

As yields rise and inflation eases, the relative allure of bond payouts becomes attractive, in absolute and relative terms vs. other assets.

James Picerno, here. 

Yields are indeed rising, but prices are still falling, so no, not quite yet. Bond prices ought to stabilize when inflation finally eases, and so far prices haven't stabilized.

VWESX is instructive.

There's just a handful of years back in the 1980s where the average price of this very long term investment grade bond fund had been below $8 like the current price is today.

That's one reason why Jeffrey Gundlach rightly says that bonds are "wickedly cheap".

But VWESX only just got there on September 20th, hitting $7.99. We're down to $7.88 this weekend.

Meanwhile yields across this investment grade spectrum are bunched up in the fours, with only about 55 basis points difference between the shorts and longs, and intermediates effectively paying the same as or more than longs.

Prices on the longs need to fall a lot more before making them more attractive than intermediates if you are going to settle for only similar yield.

After all, the long term average return of investment grade longs is north of 7.5%, not in the fours.

But what the hell do I know?

Invest, or don't, at your own risk.

Seeing this headline html first thing Saturday morning is disorienting

 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/u-s-stock-futures-slip-as-investors-await-fed-chairman-powells-jackson-hole-address-11661508928

Investors await Powell's address?

That was published 24 hours ago, before the Powell speech, and the contents were updated last evening just before 5:00 PM.

But the pain surely ain't in the Fed.

The only pain described in the story is in households, businesses, families, not in the Fed.

Those Fed guys are rich, and get paid very handsomely.

The top 100 employees each made $274k or more in 2020. They are all named, here.

That puts them in the top 2% of all wage earners in the US.

They're the elites.

They experience no pain.

The Federal Reserve System had 23,517 employees in 2021, with a total system operating expense of $5.7353 billion, or about $244k per employee.

They live in a bubble. 

Everybody's just phonin' it in and getting the hell out of Dodge for the weekend. 

Especially Drudge.

 

Pfizer’s COVID-19 antiviral Paxlovid isn’t effective for people who are vaccinated and healthy

Pfizer says Paxlovid doesn’t help COVID-19 patients unless they are high risk

Beyond parody: Delusional Rush Limbaugh says red states are paying for all this emergency spending

Here:

"The red states are gonna create capital and money to transfer to pay these people their stupid welfare costs (and whatever else they’re using to bleed this country dry), while their population sits home, doesn’t work, waits for the federal check to show up — and they sit around and they trash the supposedly reckless red states. I cannot tell you how this irritates me".

No one is "paying" for anything. It's all borrowed. And Limbaugh's personal portfolio is probably buying a bunch of it, as is every portfolio out there, from individual investors to institutional, to sovereigns, etc. The entire world craves the safety and security of US Treasury securities and can hardly get enough of them, but Limbaugh thinks Republican states are carrying the whole world on their shoulders.

Even as Limbaugh was yammering away spouting stupid, 10-year Treasury securities were flying out the door at record low rates at auction:

"The U.S. Treasury held an auction for $32 billion of 10-year notes in Tuesday afternoon, selling them at a record low yield of 0.70%". 

Federal debt has soared from $23.5 trillion on March 16th to $25.1 trillion on May 11th, and it'll keep soaring.

The Federal Reserve Bank's balance sheet has soared from $4.1 trillion on February 26th to $6.7 trillion on May 6th, and it will keep soaring.

And they are just getting started:

"The central bank had previously balked at direct aid to nonfinancial businesses, but is set to finance trillions in relief across nearly every sector of the economy amid a historic downturn".

Meanwhile Federal Reserve lending operations at ultra-low rates continue to keep businesses alive which should have died long ago. They were doing it before Trump came along, did it with Trump's assent after his election, and will keep doing it.

The Trump administration has signed off on this gargantuan repudiation of free market capitalism, but Rush Limbaugh thinks it's all paid for by Joe Sixpack.

Trump marks the end of Republicanism's "fiscal conservative" brand for at least a generation, and that's what really irritates Rush Limbaugh. He's hitched his wagon to a wayward horse and now it's in the ditch along with the rest of the country.

Stupid is as stupid does.

Don't catch a "cold" down there in that puddle.

South Korea today has 0.0002 confirmed coronavirus cases per million population, America has 0.0033, 16.5x as many

South Korea's first coronavirus infection was reported on the same day as America's first infection, but South Korea practiced strict quarantine of infected people, contact tracing, widespread testing, mask-wearing and social distancing, without locking down its economy.

America did only the social distancing part after it was already too late, and then a hodge-podge of lockdowns with that.

As a result, South Korea has almost 11,000 confirmed cases today, but America has almost 1.1 million, 100x as many.

As for deaths, South Korea has 0.0000047 per million, the US 0.0001935 per million, 41x as many.

Year over year in 1Q2020, South Korean GDP actually grew by 1.3% vs. just 0.3% for GDP in the United States (BEA Table 6), 4.3x better.

South Korea has had far fewer cases of the disease, far fewer deaths and a much better economic outcome than in the United States because it wisely understood that what it had to do wasn't an existential threat to liberty.

30-year bond yield breaks to all time low

Story:

The 30-year bond yield tumbled 5.4 basis points to 1.917%, sliding below its previous all-time low of 1.95%. 

More:

On Friday the 30-year U.S. Treasury bond yield fell 5.2 basis points to 1.92% based on Tradeweb data to an all-time low of 1.89%.  

They round it up to 1.90% at Treasury

 

Spending in 2020 on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid to hit $2.19 trillion

[S]pending on the “big three”—Social Security ($1.1 trillion), Medicare ($679 billion) and Medicaid ($418 billon)—will be approximately $2.19 trillion in 2020, nearly three times more than defense spending ($738 billion).

Story.

"The current hysteria about coronavirus is irrational"

I thought all hysterias were irrational, but OK.

From the story:

In contrast, other flu viruses in circulation in the U.S. last year took over 34,000 lives, and they are taking a similar toll this year. Yet unlike coronavirus and SARS, these flu viruses have had zero impact on the stock market. This suggests the current hysteria developing about coronavirus is irrational.

Smdh over "impact on the stock market" as a barometer, but let's move on.

34k deaths from flu last year in the US, which would aggregate at the peaks in February, December, March and January in that order on average, would mean average deaths per day over those 121 days of about 280 per day, but only at the extreme. Obviously, not everyone who died of flu that season died in those peak months.

The worst flu season in decades in the US was 2017-18 with roughly 80,000 deaths, according to WaPo. The worst of it lasted 19 weeks. All the deaths obviously didn't occur in those 19 weeks either, but had they the rate would have been 600 per day.

The extreme being claimed in Wuhan is about 700 per day due to coronavirus.

With 200 per day being normal non-epidemic-related-deaths for any given day in Wuhan, there's anecdotal "evidence" of an extra 500 per day.

Such claims may seem hysterical or irrational to some, but they are not.

They are only extreme.

  

Welcome back to the same stupid shit: Quantitative Easing, Round IV, with a half twist back flip

The long-promised balance sheet unwind stopped in early September, never getting it even remotely close to pre-Great Financial Crisis levels. Maturing securities then began to be used to purchase more of the same again, increasing the balance sheet, as plainly shown in the graph.

Now that will get even worse as the Fed begins buying $60 billion a month outright in new Treasury securities on top of this reinvesting of maturing securities. The Fed claims this is not QE because they're only going to buy Treasury Bills, not longer dated Notes. Money market rates, where many investors had parked lots of cash to take advantage of better returns than they could get on long dated securities, have already fallen. Now there will be no place left to get any decent return without tying up your money for ten years paying 1.76% and thirty years just 2.22%.

Thanks for nothing Trump! 

 

The FOMC voted unanimously to begin to purchase Treasury bills at an initial pace of about $60 billion per month starting Tuesday. The purchases will last at least into the second quarter of next year.

Read more here. 

Meanwhile benchmark revisions to the quick and dirty monthly Establishment Survey indicate 501,000 jobs have to be SUBTRACTED through March 2019

That is expected to bring down 2018 job creation to roughly 181,000 monthly instead of 223,000.

I say, so what? 223,000 monthly wasn't indicative of a jobs boom anyway.

Jobs numbers under Trump are like Trump Steaks, overcooked.

Story.

Pure insanity: 20% of total global bond market pays negative interest

Opinion: We haven’t seen interest rates this low since before Hammurabi, so what bonds should you buy?:

 

Some $13 trillion in bonds are paying negative interest rates, which means bondholders actually pay for the privilege of holding an issuer’s bonds. That represents more than 20% of a total global bond market value of $55 trillion, according to Bloomberg. Other bonds are paying positive rates so low they carry a real (after inflation) negative yield as well. ... Some civilizations, like the early Roman Catholic Church and Islam, were opposed to charging interest, but negative rates just didn’t happen, as far as Sylla knows, until the modern era. Now 14 European countries, including France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain, have negative interest rates on their two-year bonds.

 

This has to be Bernie bots trolling What's The Matter With Kansas? as silly season ramps up

Millennial couple in Kansas needs help making ends meet on $500,000 a year: