Full time jobs as a percent of population fell in August 2024 to 49.98, to 49.67 for the first eight months of the year, which is worse than both 2023 and 2022

 Bad news.

Full time as a percent of population:

Jan-Aug 8-month average

2024  49.67

2023  50.26

2022  50.12

2021  48.30

Full year average

2023  50.21

2022  50.09

2021  48.63

Bad news for Biden: Energy inflation reasserts itself for a third consecutive month, 4.8% year over year in May 2024

 

Inflation more durable than policymakers had anticipated, Joe Biden most hurt

 This week provided a reminder that inflation isn’t going away anytime soon :

The bad news began Monday when a New York Federal Reserve survey showed the consumer expectations over the longer term had accelerated in February. It continued Tuesday with news that consumer prices rose 3.2% from a year ago, and then culminated Thursday with a release indicating that pipeline pressures at the wholesale level also are heating up. ...

The latest jolt on inflation came Thursday when the Labor Department reported that the producer price index, a forward-looking measure of pipeline inflation at the wholesale level, showed a 0.6% increase in February. That was double the Dow Jones estimate and pushed the 12-month level up 1.6%, the biggest move since September 2023.

 

PLaNe TuRBuLeNCe iS GLoBaL WaRMiNG

 Bad news for nervous flyers: Turbulence is getting worse as the planet warms

 

The good news is COVID-19 deaths per million were 4-5x worse a year ago than they are now in the US

Deaths per million stabilized 8 months ago at the current level and haven't really budged since then.

Those who predicted an endemic situation developing appear to have been right.

1.2 deaths per million presently represents about 398 deaths per day at current population, or about 11.9k dying per month since mid-April.

Actual cumulative deaths over the period have averaged about 12.25k per month, or 98k.

If that rate persists like this for a full year we'll get something like 147k deaths, which would then still be 4x worse than the average influenza deaths year.

92% of COVID-19 deaths in California continue to be among those 50 and older, and 72% are among those 65 and older.

That's the bad news.

Seems like an unacceptable new normal to me.

Concentrating efforts on vaccinating people younger than 50 seems pointless and highly inappropriate for the situation.

 

How low could the S&P 500 possibly fall from the Monday, Jan 3, 2022 closing high of 4,796.56?

 Some are calling this a dot-com-like bubble "burst". 

Jeremy Grantham thinks a 40% decline is in the offing.

That burst happened gradually, actually, from August 2000 to February 2003, more like an old balloon slowly deflating in the corner of the room under a table months after the party had ended.

On an average basis, the S&P 500 fell from 2471.50 in August 2000 to 1314.31 in February 2003, in March 2022 dollars. That 1157.19 point drop amounted to a drop of 46.82%.

Before climbing to the spectacular heights we know today, the S&P 500 had another appointment with more bad news, unfortunately, in March 2009, achieving an even lower level than February 2003.

In March 2022 dollars, the S&P 500 bottomed in March 2009, again on an average basis, at 1023.36. That was 1448.14 points from 2471.50 in August 2000, a drop of 58.59%.

That was quite a long process, a very bad, no good, rotten almost a decade for stocks. Real per annum return August 2000 through March 2009 averaged  -8.14%.

Many children watched their parents lose everything, including the house.

Those February 2003 and March 2009 type of events must be recognized as within the realm of real possibility even today.

4796.56 minus 46.82% would put the S&P 500 at 2551.

Minus 58.59% . . . 1986. 

Not saying it will happen. Not saying it's even probable. Just possible, because it has happened before.

Smart investors are ready for the possible.

The index is down 18.19% from the all-time-high tonight.

 

Also today we learned that your receding shoreline is the canary in the climate coalmine

 The oceans are rising, or something, but not on Martha's Vineyard.

Receding hairlines remain unexplained.

“Now for the bad news: We are nowhere near where we need to be yet…Most countries have failed to meet the action plans that they set 6 years ago".

Breakthrough cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in wretched data manipulating Tennessee in Sep 2021: 16%, 13%, 15% respectively

Breakthrough hospitalizations and deaths showed modest declines compared to August proportions of 14% and 17% respectively. Since hospitalizations and deaths are lagging indicators, however, the rise in breakthrough cases from 14% to 16% may be a harbinger of more bad news in Tennessee.

The data isn't presented in a straightforward manner. Subtract the percentages shown in the table from 100 to get the breakthrough figures. I can imagine some idiot looking at that table, wondering what the hell he's lookin' at.

Vaccines do not make one bulletproof, as story after story makes plain. This is especially the case for the elderly, for whom the risk of death is the highest, vaccinated or not. Waning vaccine effectiveness is only the second biggest concern facing this group.

But in Tennessee you wouldn't know risk of death is highest if you are old anyway, if you relied on Tennessee's COVID statewide dashboard, hilariously entitled "unified command". You won't find death information visualized anywhere, let alone by age. Cases are visualized by age, which is even more misleading to the elderly since cases abound among the younger tranches, not the older.

You really have to hunt for the death data on a different page and download the data in XLS format from a long list of available data sets entitled "Daily Age Group Outcomes- Statewide case outcomes by age group", and then do the math. And do you see the word "death" in there anywhere?

It's really irresponsible. It's almost like Tennessee is trying to hide the deaths from its old people, and throw shade on the vaccines, by publishing the breakthrough data in a weird way, at the same time. A conspiracy theorist would say they're tryin' to get rid of 'em, real quiet like.

I count 13,119 deaths in TN to date from COVID in people 61 years of age or older, which is about 82% of all the pandemic deaths in the state.

Tennessee really, really sucks at this.

 

 

I've gotta ask it

Did the CDC release the Sep 10 study the day before the 9/11 anniversary hoping everyone would ignore it?

The 10th was also a Friday, the usual day for the government to publish the bad news while everyone is getting ready for the weekend.

The study is also noteworthy for its "Look! Over there! A deer!" quality, repeatedly framing how  everything "is higher in unvaccinated than vaccinated persons".

And look how that title assiduously avoids using the word "breakthrough", too. 

It's like a whole package of screams shouting "Nothing to see here!"

 

The on-going housing bubble

I checked the value of my home on Zillow today.

It's nuts.

After 13 years the estimated price is up 6.5% per annum.

On the other hand, the house I previously owned and sold is up only 0.8% per annum over the same period.

Two entirely different houses, two entirely different locations, two completely different histories. What seems like a bubble living in my current house wouldn't seem like one living in my old one.

The best way I've found to think about this is to ask, How much of a house will my income buy? For bubble purposes nationally, even though housing is a regional and local matter, use median household income and median sales price.

Here's the chart of that data as currently available.

In 2020 the Median Sales Price of Houses Sold for the United States (MSPUS) averaged a new high of almost $337k. We don't yet have the median household income figure for 2020, but it's likely to be bad news, skewing the graph lower again as less income buys a smaller share of increasingly expensive housing.

As you can plainly see, the trend for the percentage of a house purchased by an income has been all downhill since the end of Reagan Bull in 2000. The percentage really fell a lot during the housing bubble which peaked in 2005-06, helping precipitate GFC1. Incomes fell a lot after the Great Financial Crisis because people lost their jobs by the millions and never got them back and so less income purchased less house. Housing prices bottomed in 2012 and then rebounded slowly. Incomes did not, however, and what you made just kept buying less in the low range of 19%. 

That all sucked. Obama really sucked. Sucked historically bad. Record-setting bad. 

You'll notice things really improved in 2019, however. That's because median household income shot up $5k to over $68k (Trump tax cuts), and the median sales price of a house actually fell $5k to $320k. Your higher income bought more of a slightly cheaper house, not as much as the good old days, but more.

Unfortunately in 2020 median sales price shot up almost $17k while millions upon millions lost their jobs. The feds enacted foreclosure forbearance so that 2.3 million homes whose owners lost their jobs never came onto the market. But desperate people who wanted out of cities snarfed up inventory. Demand far exceeded supply, so prices went up. 

But even at 21.5% in 2019 housing was nowhere near affordable like it was from 1987-2001. It was a nice, hopeful moment, while it lasted.

I'm guessing it's going to be quite a while, though, before we ever see even that again. 

The coronavirus death trend is going the wrong way, however, in the "second tier" states

Mostly driven by AZ, but also by SC, and to a lesser extent by AL. Many of these states are treading water, which means current deaths are enough to keep the average from falling as time proceeds. We don't want to see that. We want to see deaths slow enough for the averages to fall naturally with the passing of time. For the period shown, only MN has dropped (-1).

Seeing that AZ averaged just 11 per day in mid-June but is now at 18 is bad news. 18 was the floor I used to incorporate TX in my list of worst 15 states back in late June. Otherwise it had been a list of 14 worst.

Despite rising coronavirus deaths in California, Arizona, Texas and Florida, the overall trend remains down

Daily new deaths nationally hit an interim low on Jun 21 of 257 in the New York Times data set. This was followed by 270 on Jun 28, 264 on Jul 4, and 262 on Jul 5. Clearly the period from the third week of June to the Fourth of July holiday has marked a welcome low in pandemic deaths.

In the 15 worst states for deaths from coronavirus since the beginning of the pandemic, it is telling how the average of daily new deaths measured from the beginning continues to trend lower. The worst states for average daily new deaths measured from the beginning, as of Jun 27, were, in this order: NY NJ PA MI MA IL CT CA LA FL MD OH GA IN and TX.  

On Jun 27, the sum of the average of daily new deaths from coronavirus in those 15 states stood at 852, measured from the beginning in each state. Again, that's the sum of average daily new deaths in the 15 worst states since the beginning of the pandemic on that date. It includes any and all revisions and updates reported to date, for whatever reason. No messing around with moving averages and all the BS (Yes, I'm talking about you New York, you New Jersey, you Delaware, you Illinois, and who knows who else) which gave false indications at a point in time in the past because the data was provisional, or standards of inclusion changed, or somebody came along and cleaned up your sorry mess. This way at least you have a fixed terminus a quo in each state, and a moving terminus ad quem which you can track from day to day which incorporates all the changes smoothed out over the long haul. A nice relatively clean benchmark, at a time when it appears we have otherwise reached a new low ebb.

Well, a week later from Jun 27 when we were at 852, on Jul 4 that sum had fallen to 828. By Jul 7 it had fallen again, to 819. And despite the rise in deaths in the south very recently, the sum on Jul 8 fell again, to 817 as of this morning's figures.

Despite all the bad news in the south (CA 145 deaths on 7/8, AZ 101 on 7/7, TX 119 on 7/8), and New Jersey again dumping 142 new deaths into the numbers on Jul 8 (really New Jersey?), the death trend in the worst hit states, which again does include CA, TX and FL, overall continues to trend lower. This is what one would expect if the worst of the pandemic is behind us. Time marches on and naturally ameliorates the ugly data, as long as no new ugly data appear. You'd be able to tell easily if deaths were getting worse because the average from the beginning would flatline and then trend higher. Or if suddenly AZ, for example, joined the list of worst hit states (I'm using a low threshold of 18 average daily new deaths measured from the beginning), that would be a huge red flag (AZ did tick up, however, from 11 average daily new deaths to 12 recently). CO at 14 and VA at 15 would be more likely candidates to join the list than AZ at this point. But so far neither flatlining of the average nor "new joiners" is happening.

The death trend is lower.

So far. 

Today the US registered 120,036 deaths from COVID-19 at the Johns Hopkins University dashboard

Here's the progression:

50k 4/24

60k 4/29  5 days

70k 5/5    6 days

80k 5/11  6 days

90k 5/18  7 days

100k 5/27  9 days

110k 6/7    11 days

120k 6/22  15 days.

Stay-at-home orders, growth of clinical expertise, and increased mask-wearing among other things have all made a huge impact on the growth of deaths.

New daily deaths hit 275 on Sunday, which was last lower way back on March 25, with 270.

It looks like it will take something like another 20 days to add another 10k deaths, so 130k by roughly July 15.  On May 18 I projected 155k by then, so obviously there's been a big slow down since late May when the projected 100k deaths projected was met.

That's the good news.

The bad news is case counts nationally are rising again after bottoming on May 11. New daily cases were so high on June 20 that you had to go back to May 1 to find a higher single day. In key states in the South this increase is not attributable to increased testing, especially in Florida where testing has declined and in other states where hospitalization increases are outstripping testing increases. Texas, Arizona, California and the Carolinas are all pointed to as examples.

Expect death counts to pick up again starting roughly July 15 due to the mid-June turn higher in cases. It takes about 28 days from classification as a case to classification as a death, according to the modeling.

Death is a lagging indicator. Low deaths today are the result of good action taken many yesterdays ago.   

The bad news is exactly two weeks after Fri May 22, the kickoff to the Memorial Day holiday weekend, new daily COVID-19 cases are making records in 9 states and Puerto Rico

Michigan had an astounding 4,529 new daily cases added on Fri Jun 5, 2020.

TNR puts fake Indian Elizabeth Warren high on the authentic politician spectrum, which is pretty bad news for all the other fakers

As of right now, Trump will not win reelection with Michigan

More bad news for President Donald Trump in latest Michigan poll:

But since only 31 percent of all of those surveyed said they would definitely vote again for Trump, it shows a problem for Trump even among those who would be expected to be his most loyal supporters — the 42 percent who identify as Republican voters. "The vote to re-elect numbers are 31 percent — 11 points below the (Republican) Party identification. That spells trouble for him," said Porn. "And there are people who are saying they like him, or are giving him a positive job rating, who are still saying they won't re-elect him. That gap is a problem." ... For the poll, EPIC-MRA of Lansing randomly surveyed 600 likely voters in Michigan between Sunday and Thursday of this week. The margin of error is plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Laugh of the Day: Socialist Jew invested in being white gets the bad news that just being white makes him a racist

Isaac Chotiner: What could a white person in America in 2018 do to not be racist, or do you believe that’s impossible?

Robin DiAngelo: Well, I have to ask you a question I forgot to ask you earlier. What is your racial identity?

Isaac Chotiner: I’m white. My family’s originally from Eastern Europe. 

Seen here.

Republicans don't have the votes for Ryan's Obamacare-Lite bill, so . . .

. . . if Ryan allows the bill to come to the floor for a vote and it fails, you'll know Ryan did that to embarrass Trump. It's fully within Ryan's power to whip the vote and to discover the bad news ahead of time to keep the bill from coming to a vote to prevent embarrassing Trump.

Consider how Ryan has been promoting Trump's negotiating skills in this affair in the build up to the vote in the meantime, how involved Trump is, how Trump is closing the deal according to Ryan. Suddenly Ryan is Trump's greatest advocate anywhere on Capitol Hill!

And when the bill fails, Trump doesn't look so hot, does he. The vaunted deal-maker is brought down a few notches. And Ryan blames the conservatives, achieving two objectives in one stroke. Trump is humiliated, and conservatives become even more marginalized.

Ryan is Trump's enemy, not his friend. Ryan is our enemy.

If all that happens, watch out.

It will be war.

Obama hollowed out the military and SECDEF Mattis wants to keep those responsible in place at DOD

Kimberley Strassel delivers the bad news here:

President Trump promised to rebuild our hollowed-out military, a cause as urgent as any domestic priority. Years of Obama budget cuts and neglect slashed force sizes and provoked a readiness crisis. Over half the Navy’s aircraft are grounded. Of 58 Army brigade combat teams, only three are ready to immediately join a fight. The Air Force is short pilots and aircraft maintenance workers. ...

[Mattis] wanted, for instance, former Obama undersecretary Michèle Flournoy for a top post. He’s looked to recruit from Ms. Flournoy’s liberal-hawk think tank, the Center for New American Security. And he’s pushed for some names who hail from Never Trump backgrounds, including Mary Beth Long, an official in George W. Bush’s Pentagon.

Perhaps only to make a point, Mr. Mattis is blocking some rock-star conservative talent. One is Mira Ricardel, a former Boeing executive and Bush Pentagon alum who helped with the Trump transition. Mr. Mattis continues to nix a long list of names offered by the White House team. ...

The Pentagon today remains in the hands of Obama holdovers who have spent years thwarting congressional requests, minimizing readiness problems, and generally covering for Obama failures. Those holdovers include Deputy Secretary Robert Work, an opponent of reform, and Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs Stephen Hedger.

Mr. Hedger helped write an infamous 2016 Pentagon memo outlining how the Obama administration could use a presidential veto of greater defense spending as a “weapon” to get other Obama priorities. Civil servants are also place-warming other key positions. As well-intentioned as many are, it’s unrealistic to expect this crew to march in a new direction after eight years under President Obama.

Mattis isn't a Mad Dog. He's just mad, as in crazy.

It takes the LA Times 8 handwringing paragraphs to break the bad news: Trump leads Clinton 43 to 40 in tracking poll

But there's really nothing to see . . .

Here.