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

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

 

"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.

  

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:

 

Wow, I'm among the elite 5%

Waking up early can make you healthier and wealthier — yet 95% of Americans hate mornings

LOL, George Soros says European Union may go away just like Soviet Union did, blames existence of political parties and freedom!

The disappearance of the Soviet Union was a good thing, but obviously not to George Soros.

The existence of political parties is a manifestation of freedom, but Georgie Boy obviously would prefer a one-party state, complete with police-state powers to impose its will.

This guy really is as awful as people say. The socialist mushrooms popping up in the Democrat-controlled US House must mean to him it's now an opportune time to say these things openly.

In his own words:

Opinion: Europe may be on the cusp of a nightmare, but it’s not too late to wake up

"Europe is sleepwalking into oblivion, and the people of Europe need to wake up before it is too late. If they don’t, the European Union will go the way of the Soviet Union in 1991. ... anti-European forces will enjoy a competitive advantage in the balloting. There are several reasons for this, including the outdated party system that prevails in most European countries, the practical impossibility of treaty change, and the lack of legal tools for disciplining member states that violate the principles on which the European Union was founded."

The BS headline about jobs the open-borders fanatics keep repeating: Job openings outnumber available workers

The unemployment level is currently 6.06 million. The part-time who want a full-time job currently number 4.87 million. The number not-in-the-labor-force-want-a-job-now is 5.18 million in May 2018. Add 'em all up and there's 16.11 million people right here in America for the 6.55 million job openings. The employers don't fill the jobs because they can, otherwise the situation wouldn't persist.

Meanwhile 78 million gig workers work side-hustles to make ends meet.

Not enough workers? Like hell there aren't.

Peter Morici: Republican opposition to regulating prices will bring Medicaid-like single payer to USA

Here.

Surprise, the tax cuts are showing up in, not your wallet, but enormous stock buy-backs by large corporations, which explains the rising stock market

In other words, so-called sideline cash coming into the market is really nothing more than taxcut cash reallocated to stock buy-backs by corporate America.

Marketwatch reports here:

But now, courtesy of Goldman Sachs, we know where the tax cut is really going. Surprise! It’s paying for stock repurchases by corporations, as Corporate America despairs of investing in much other than dividing the pie provided by near-record profitability into fewer and larger pieces.

Buyback announcements are up 22% this year to $67 billion in just six weeks, Goldman said in a note to clients. This follows a report by benefits consulting firm Aon Hewitt finding that 83% of large companies don’t expect the tax cut to boost salaries at all — just help pay for small bonuses companies like WalMart and AT&T gave workers, which reporters soon discovered were, themselves, skewed toward higher-paid, longer-tenured employees in many cases.

Tax Policy Center expects charitable giving to drop by $13 to $20 billion annually because of Republican tax reform

Way to go, Brownie!

Discussed here.