Low inflation expectations based on June were clobbered by the facts, but to hell with the facts. $SPX is down only 0.07% at this hour.
The market cheerleaders desperately cling to the belief that the Fed must lower interest rates in September. When the numbers come in 0.1 below expectations, they go wild and drive up stocks like madmen believing they must be right. When the forecast misses like this they just hold.
On a year over year basis, the forecast was for +2.5% for overall wholesale prices, but they got +3.3% instead, seasonally adjusted.
For core wholesale prices the consensus forecast was for +2.9% year over year, but they got +3.7% instead, again seasonally adjusted.
Wholesale prices rose far more than expected in
July, providing a potential sign that inflation is still a threat to the
U.S. economy, a Bureau of Labor Statistics report Thursday showed.
The producer price index,
which measures final demand goods and services prices, jumped 0.9% on
the month, compared with the Dow Jones estimate for a 0.2% gain. It was
the biggest monthly increase since June 2022.
Excluding
food and energy prices, core PPI rose 0.9% against the forecast for
0.3%. Excluding food, energy and trade services, the index was up 0.6%,
the biggest gain since March 2022. ...
It's not a potential sign of inflation, you idiots. It's a real sign.
The year over year numbers, not seasonally adjusted, for core wholesale price increases in the July report are oddly unchanged from the June report in no respect, for the increases since October 2024. In fact, the figures are exactly the same to five decimal places. It's like everybody went on vacation and just copied and pasted and went to the beach:
Nov 2024: 3.35987
Dec 2024: 3.74962
Jan 2025: 3.92532
Feb 2025: 3.73239
Mar 2025: 3.78846
Apr 2025: 3.07652
May 2025: 3.21542
Jun 2025: 2.62853
and Jul 2025: 3.65568.
The average of these Nov thru May is 3.54965. July looks like that, but June sure the hell still does not.
I smell a rat.
Meanwhile . . .
Core cpi inflation yoy averaged 2.9% in the first half of 2025, but 3.1% in July.
Core pce inflation yoy averaged 2.8% in the first half of 2025 (July numbers come Aug 29th).
But core wholesale prices were up 3.4% in the first half on average, and 3.7% in July according to today's report.
How long can producers not pass that along? Or do we have a broader issue here with trustworthy numbers, because Mad King Ludwig is in charge?
Electricity will be ten cents again when pigs fly.
“Under my administration, we will be slashing energy and electricity prices by half within 12 months, at a maximum 18 months,”he told an audiencein North Carolina in August 2024.
... DOGE’s
savings calculations are based on faulty math. The group uses the
maximum spending possible under each contract as its baseline — meaning
all money an agency could spend in future fiscal years. That amount can
far exceed what the government has actually committed to pay out.
Counting this “ceiling value” gives a false picture of savings for taxpayers.
“That’s
the equivalent of basically taking out a credit card with a $20,000
credit limit, canceling it and then saying, ‘I’ve just saved $20,000,’”
said Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law
studies at George Washington University Law School. “Anything that’s
been said publicly about [DOGE’s] savings is meaningless.” ...
1958 was a close second place drinking low year at 55% as their parents realized "My God, what have we done?" ha ha ha.
Seriously now, 71% drank in 1976, 1977, and 1978, the Baby Boom Bender.
Prior to 1984, many states like Wisconsin had lowered the drinking age to 18 from 21 because the voting age had been changed to 18 in 1971 by the 26th Amendment.
The National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984 turned this back the other way again by withholding federal highway funds from states that did not raise
their drinking age back to 21, which Wisconsin finally did in 1986. Wisconsin had a tiered system between 1984 and 1986 where the drinking age was 19 for beer and wine and 21 for liquor.
... “The
hope was that he would pick someone . . . who people would have trust
in and could lead the BLS in an appropriate way, with relevant
experience and, ideally, not hyper-partisan,” said Stan Veuger, senior
fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute think-tank.
“EJ Antoni is really the opposite of that.”
“Even the people who may be somewhat sympathetic to his economic policy views don’t think he’s qualified,” added Veuger. ...
This isn’t socialism, in which the state owns the means of production. It is more like state capitalism, a hybrid between socialism and capitalism in which the state guides the decisions of nominally private enterprises.
China calls its hybrid “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” The U.S. hasn’t gone as far as China or even milder practitioners of state capitalism such as Russia, Brazil and, at times, France. So call this variant “state capitalism with American characteristics.” It is still a sea change from the free market ethos the U.S. once embodied.
We wouldn’t be dabbling with state capitalism if not for the public’s and both parties’ belief that free-market capitalism wasn’t working. That system encouraged profit-maximizing CEOs to move production abroad. The result was a shrunken manufacturing workforce, dependence on China for vital products such as critical minerals, and underinvestment in the industries of the future such as clean energy and semiconductors.
The federal government has often waded into the corporate world. It commandeered production during World War II and, under the Defense Production Act, emergencies such as the Covid-19 pandemic. It bailed out banks and car companies during the 2007-09 financial crisis. Those, however, were temporary expedients.
Former PresidentJoe Bidenwent further, seeking to shape the actual structure of industry. His Inflation Reduction Act authorized $400 billion in clean-energy loans. The Chips and Science Act earmarked $39 billion in subsidies for domestic semiconductor manufacturing. Of that,$8.5 billion went to Intel, giving Trump leverage to demand the removal of its CEO over past ties to China. (Intel so far has refused.)
Biden officials had mulled a sovereign-wealth fund to finance strategically important but commercially risky projects such as in critical minerals, which China dominates. Last month, Trump’s Department of Defense said it would takea 15% stake in MP Materials, a miner of critical minerals.
Many in the West admire China for its ability to turbocharge growth through massive feats of infrastructure building, scientific advance and promotion of favored industries. American efforts are often bogged down amid the checks, balances and compromises of pluralistic democracy.
In his forthcoming book, “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future,” authorDan Wangwrites: “China is an engineering state, building big at breakneck speed, in contrast to the United States’ lawyerly society, blocking everything it can, good and bad.”
To admirers, Trump’s appeal is his willingness to bulldoze those lawyerly obstacles. He has imposed tariffs on an array of countries and sectors, seizing authority that is supposed to belong to Congress. He extracted $1.5 trillion in investment pledges from Japan, the European Union and South Korea that he claims he will personally direct, though no legal mechanism for doing so appears to exist. (Those pledges are already in dispute.)
There are reasons state capitalism never caught on before. The state can’t allocate capital more efficiently than private markets. Distortions, waste and cronyism typically follow. Russia, Brazil and France have grown much more slowly than the U.S.
Chinese state capitalism isn’t the success story it seems.Barry Naughtonof the University of California, San Diego has documented howChina’s rapid growth since 1979has come from market sources, not the state. As Chinese leaderXi Jinpinghas reimposed state control, growth has slowed. China is awash with savings, but the state wastes much of it. From steel to vehicles, excess capacity leads to plummeting prices and profits.
State capitalism is an all-of-society affair in China, directed from Beijing via millions of cadres in local governments and company boardrooms. In the U.S., it consists largely of Oval Office announcements lacking any policy or institutional framework. “The core characteristic of China’s state capitalism is discipline, and Trump is the complete opposite of that,” Wang said in an interview.
State capitalism is a means of political, not just economic, control. Xi ruthlessly deploys economic levers to crush any challenge to party primacy. In 2020,Alibabaco-founderJack Ma, arguably the country’s most famous business leader, criticized Chinese regulators for stifling financial innovation. Retaliation was swift. Regulatorscanceled the initial public offeringof Ma’s financial company, Ant Group, and eventuallyfined it $2.8 billionfor anticompetitive behavior. Ma briefly disappeared from public view.
Trump has similarly deployed executive orders and regulatory powers against media companies, banks, law firms and other companies he believes oppose him, while rewarding executives who align themselves with his priorities.
In Trump’s first term, CEOs routinely spoke out when they disagreed with his policies such as on immigration and trade. Now, they shower him with donations and praise, or are mostly silent.
Trump is also seeking political control over agencies that have long operated at arm’s length from the White House, such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Federal Reserve. That, too, has echoes of China where the bureaucracy is fully subordinate to the ruling party.
Trump has long admired the control Xi exercises over his country, but there are, in theory, limits to how far he can emulate him.
American democracy constrains the state through an independent judiciary, free speech, due process and the diffusion of power among multiple levels and branches of government. How far state capitalism ultimately displaces free-market capitalism in the U.S. depends on how well those checks and balances hold up.
... his emergency control is set to expire after a maximum of 30 days,
according to the statute. That can be extended, but only if Congress
passes a law authorizing it.
While Trump has frequently complained
about crime in the district, violent crime there has fallen to a
30-year low as of January, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. ...
... Trump is conservatism’s actual nemesis: a wild boar — psychologically
incapable of understanding anything but dominance and revenge, with no
knowledge of history, crashing obliviously and malevolently through the
ruined landscape of our constitutional democracy.
This very Greek tragedy — conservatives killing the
Constitution they love because they hate the left more — is made more
poignant by Trump’s utter cluelessness: he doesn’t even intend
to end the American experiment in self-government and individual
freedom. He isn’t that sophisticated. He is ending it simply because he
knows no other way of being a human being. He cannot tolerate any system
where he does not have total control. Character counts, as
conservatives once insisted,
and a man with Trump’s psyche, when combined with his demagogic genius,
is quite simply incompatible with liberal democratic society. Unfit. ...
I recall that when I first wrote that I didn’t believe
Trump would concede an election he lost, and thereby provoke a
constitutional crisis, I was also told I was hyperventilating. But it
happened. And Americans rewarded it four years
later by re-electing the man who tried to destroy their democracy.
That’s exactly as the ancient political philosophers predicted: as
democracies enter their late, chaotic stage, the people want
an autocrat. They yearn for one. And in America, they voted for one
twice. The forces we are up against are far beyond Trump. They’re called
the cycles of history and a critical mass of the American people, who
no longer want to govern themselves, who are sick of this republic and
no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they
despise. ...
Andrew Sullivan intimately knows all about not governing oneself. If only the Democrats did, who relentlessly persecuted and prosecuted Trump while in office and out. That's why we are here.
... Monitoring Analytics, the independent market watchdog for
the mid-Atlantic grid, produced research in June showing that 70% — or
$9.3 billion — of last year’s increased electricity cost was the result
of data center demand. ...
PJM [Interconnection, the mid-Atlantic grid operator], has yet to propose ways to guarantee that data centers pay their
freight, but Monitoring Analytics is floating the idea that data centers
should be required to procure their own power.
In a filing last month, it said that would avoid a “massive wealth transfer” from average people to tech companies. ...
The quantity of electricity generated in the US by all sources, from
natural gas to rooftop solar, rose by 3.1% in 2024 from 2023 to a record
of 4,304,039 gigawatt-hours (GWh), according to data from the EIA
today.
This is now clearly a breakout in demand, after 14 years of
stagnation, from 2007 through 2021, when electricity users, to reduce
their costs, invested in more efficient equipment – lights, appliances,
electronic equipment, industrial equipment, heating and
air-conditioning, etc. – and in better building insulation, shading,
etc., to reduce their power costs. This relentless drive for greater
efficiency kept demand roughly stable for years despite the growing
economy and population. And it mired many power generators and electric
utilities in a no-growth business where it was difficult to justify
investment.
Now the scenario has changed, largely due to the growth in demand
from data centers (AI, cloud, crypto) and the increasing penetration of
EVs in the national vehicle fleet – EVs accounted for over 10% of US vehicle sales in 2024. ...
... Notably, Norman was one of the few House lawmakers not to endorse Trump in 2024, backing former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley instead.
In his late July announcement of his upcoming gubernatorial bid,
however, he praised Trump, predicting “what he did [in Iran] is going to
put him in the annals of the greatest presidents we have ever had.” ...
... One of NASA’s most traveled astronauts in the agency’s first decade,
Lovell flew four times — Gemini 7, Gemini 12, Apollo 8 and Apollo 13 —
with the two Apollo flights riveting the folks back on Earth.
In 1968, the Apollo 8 crew of Lovell, Frank Borman and William
Anders was the first to leave Earth’s orbit and the first to fly to and
circle the moon. They could not land, but they put the U.S. ahead of the
Soviets in the space race. Letter writers told the crew that their
stunning pale blue dot photo of Earth from the moon, a world first, and
the crew’s Christmas Eve reading from Genesis saved America from a
tumultuous 1968.
But the big rescue mission was still to come. That was during the
harrowing Apollo 13 flight in April 1970. Lovell was supposed to be the
fifth man to walk on the moon. But Apollo 13′s service module, carrying
Lovell and two others, experienced a sudden oxygen tank explosion on its
way to the moon. The astronauts barely survived, spending four cold and
clammy days in the cramped lunar module as a lifeboat. ...
“I think in the history of space flight, I would say that Jim was one
of the pillars of the early space flight program,” Gene
Kranz, NASA’s legendary flight director, once said. ...
The Apollo 13 crew of Lovell, Haise and Swigert was on the way to the
moon in April 1970, when an oxygen tank from the spaceship exploded
200,000 miles from Earth.
That, Lovell recalled, was “the most
frightening moment in this whole thing.” Then oxygen began escaping and
“we didn’t have solutions to get home.”
“We knew we were in deep, deep trouble,” he told NASA’s historian.
Four-fifths of the way to the moon, NASA scrapped the mission. Suddenly, their only goal was to survive. ...
Consumers are racing to buy electric vehicles before a fast-approaching deadline to claim tax credits worth up to $7,500, according to auto analysts.
Legislation championed by Republicans on Capitol Hill and signed by President Donald Trump in July eliminates the tax breaks — available for new, used and leased EVs — after Sept. 30.
The Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act had originally offered the tax breaks to consumers through 2032.
“We’re
expecting Q3 may be [a] record for EV sales because of the tax
incentives going away,” said Stephanie Valdez Streaty, a senior analyst
at Cox Automotive.
“People are rushing out” to buy, she said.
Consumers purchased nearly 130,100 new EVs in
July, the second-highest monthly sales tally on record, behind roughly
136,000 sold in December, according to Cox Automotive data. The July
figures represent a 26.4% increase from June and nearly 20% increase
year-over-year, Streaty said.
The share of EV sales in July also
accounted for about 9.1% of total sales of passenger vehicles that
month, the largest monthly share on record, according to Cox.
“We’re
seeing significant volume in new EVs,” said Liz Najman, director of
market insights at Recurrent, an EV marketplace and data provider. ...
Gold futures climbed to a record high on Friday after a report that
the United States had imposed tariffs on imports of 1-kg gold bars,
while spot gold stayed on track for a second straight weekly gain on
tariff turmoil and U.S. interest rate-cut hopes. ...
U.S. gold futures for December delivery were up 0.9% at $3,484.10, after hitting an all-time high of $3,534.10.
The price spread between New York futures and spot prices widened by
more than $100 after the Financial Times reported on Thursday that the
United States had imposed tariffs on imports of 1-kg gold bars, citing a
letter from Customs and Border Protection.
The letter, dated July
31, said 1-kg and 100-ounce gold bars should be classified under a
customs code subject to higher tariffs, a move that could impact
Switzerland, the world’s largest gold refining hub.
The tariffs on
gold bars “will create a dislocation or rather some issues in terms of
settlement by big banks” and this was reflected in liquidity prices this
morning, with prices jumping everywhere, said Brian Lan, managing
director at GoldSilver Central, Singapore. ...
So the Congress could evade responsibility for high unemployment as well as for high inflation, that's why.
A bunch of cowards six ways to Sunday they are.
Besides, core personal consumption expenditures is the Fed's key metric, as everyone knows, and that is an inflation metric, not an employment metric.
And The Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act specifically recognizes that reducing inflation is the Fed's main job, actually mandating ZERO inflation, not 2% inflation as widely misinterpreted.
Meanwhile there is another report of employment besides the total non-farm payrolls report which the Fed can consult, and it shows employment continues near all-time highs in July.
No change to DFF was the appropriate response of the Fed to persistent core inflation way above 2%.
... Starting next year, the legislation caps the amount of federal loans
students can borrow for graduate school at $100,000 over a lifetime —
and sets a lifetime loan limit of $200,000 for professional programs,
such as medical, dental or law school. Grad PLUS loans will also be eliminated entirely. Those changes go into effect for new borrowers on July 1, 2026. ...
However, for aspiring doctors, the limits may mean drastic changes.
The average cost of medical school already exceeds $200,000. At private
institutions, the average cost is more than $300,000, according to 2024 data from the Association of American Medical Colleges. ...
... Newsom is offering voters a professor at the very moment they want to elevate a brawler. Pritzker’s primetime slugfest with Abbott and Paxton is designed to leave no doubt in voters’ minds that he’s a brawler.
There’s also the practical fact that the billionaire governor’s stacks of cash are a more immediate help to Texas Democrats than they are to Newsom’s longer-term play. State Democrats had ruled out a “quorum bust” due to cost and logistical challenges, until Pritzker offered to finance and organize the operation. Now they give official press conferences in front ofPritzker’s campaign logo. If Pritzker wants to be seen as the party’s “can-do” Democrat, this is a great way to start. ...
... Esther Bland, 78, who lives in Buckley, Washington, said groceries are a “minor” source of stress — but only because her local food banks fill the gap. Bland relies on her Social Security and disability payments each month to cover her rent and other expenses — such as veterinary care for her dogs — in retirement, after decades working in an office processing product orders.
“I have no savings,” she said. “I’m not sure what’s going on politically when it comes tothe food banks, but if I lost that, groceries would absolutely be a major source of stress.”
Bland’s monthly income mainly goes toward her electric, water and cable bills, she said, as well as care of her dogs and other household needs.
“Soap, paper towels, toilet paper. I buy gas at Costco, but we haven’t seen $3 a gallon here in a long time,” she said. “I stay home a lot. I only put about 50 miles on my car a week.” ...
Bland, the Washington state retiree, said she’s paid for pet surgery with a pay-later plan. ...
