Thursday, May 29, 2025
CNBC avoids the story like the plague: Real GDP for 1Q2025 was revised up to -0.2% from -0.3% in today's second estimate for 1Q
No one wants to talk about this. Crickets pretty much everywhere. CNBC had Rosie on to discuss, but there was no article.
These lunatics are their own worst enemies
The guy with the common sense about the national debt who stands in the way of Trump's Big Beautiful Bill wants to re-litigate 9/11.
Few people consider that the Great Depression of the 1930s was the unwind of the Great Inflation of WWI
Economics is mean-reverting.
We've been liberated from Liberation Day by two Republicans (one appointed by Trump) and one Democrat on a court handpicked by Trump to adjudicate his tariffs lol
The U.S. Court of International Trade on Wednesday blocked steep reciprocal tariffs unilaterally imposed by President Donald Trump on scores of countries in April to correct what he said were persistent trade imbalances. ...
In its ruling, a three-judge panel on the Court of International Trade said that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which Trump invoked to impose the tariffs, does not authorize a president to levy universal duties on imports.“The Worldwide and Retaliatory Tariff Orders exceed any authority
granted to the President by IEEPA to regulate importation by means of
tariffs,” the judges wrote.
And separate, specific tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China related to drug trafficking “fail because they do not deal with the threats set forth in those orders,” the panel wrote.
Implementing tariffs typically requires congressional approval.
But Trump chose to bypass Congress by declaring a national economic emergency under IEEPA, which became law in 1977, and then using the purported emergency as justification for cutting Congress out of the process.
The panel not only ordered a permanent halt to the tariffs at issue in the case, but it also barred any future modifications to them.
The Trump administration was given 10 days to make the necessary changes to carry out the judges’ orders. ...
Wednesday, May 28, 2025
Different parties, same hopium: In September 2012 Barack Obama accepted the Democrats' nomination saying Hope Needs More Time, now Trump says he needs another two weeks to see whether Putin really wants peace in Ukraine
Like Putin's record three-day bombardment of Ukraine last weekend wasn't an answer.
CNBC piles on Elon Musk with unfair story about latest test flight of Starship, which was hardly a setback
SpaceX saw its Starship system explode on Tuesday in a test flight, the third consecutive setback for Elon Musk’s rocket maker.
There's a far less biased presentation here:
The lead actor in the sequel to the Grace Commission didn't realize it was just a show
... “I was, like, disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly,
which increases the budget deficit, not just decrease it, and
undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” Musk said in a clip the program shared on social media platform X. ... “I think a bill can be big or it could be beautiful, but I don’t know if it could be both,” Musk said in the clip. ...
In an interview with The Washington Post published Tuesday, Musk said that the federal bureaucracy is “much worse than I realized” and that DOGE became “the whipping boy for everything.”
Tuesday, May 27, 2025
At 65.6% in 2024, the homeownership rate in the United States matches the 1980 rate, which was an historical high water mark not exceeded until 1997
For all the justified complaining about not being able to afford a home, the homeownership rate in 2024 is historically pretty good, one of just twenty years since 1963 at the level of 65.6% or higher. 66% of the time the homeownership rate has been lower than it was in 2024.
In 2023 housing affordability in the United States bounced off the 2022 low but is still 9.15 points off the more affordable levels of the 1980s
The median income in 2022 bought just 17.22% of the median house, the all-time low in the most up-to-date data.
In 2023 that rose to 18.89%.
Peak affordability in the data was in 1984 at 28.04%.
The decline of worker hours in America
In 1966 all the hours worked by all the full time and part time workers divided by the civilian employment level peaked at about 35.35 hours per worker per week. That's full time level work. That's prosperity.
The flood of Baby Boomers, especially Baby Boomer women under the influence of feminism and the social revolution of the 1960s, and also foreign born workers after the Immigration Act of 1965, into the labor markets after the mid-1960s reduced hours per week per worker by almost 11%, not forming a new stable bottom until the 1980s at about 31.5 hours per week.
Increased labor supply = fewer hours to go around = less prosperity.
By 1999, when peak Baby Boom had passed 40 years of age, hours per week had risen as high as 32.68 per worker per week. That was the end result of the good times kick-started by Ronald Reagan twenty years prior, which hit in four waves: 1984-85, 1989, 1995, and 1999.
But the whole subsequent period 2003-2019 inclusive fell apart.
Many, many troubles reduced hours worked per worker by almost 7% between 1999 and 2009, not the least of which were admission of China to the World Trade Organization in 2001, and the Great Recession.
Hours per week per worker have risen again as of 2022, but only to the old bottom, at around 31.57 per week.
Median real earnings per week are up just $38 since 1979.
Will that be As Good As It Gets?
Monday, May 26, 2025
Putin pummels Kyiv for a third consecutive record night, makes a fool of Trump and his naive peace overtures and Friedrich Merz's promise of cruise missiles if elected in Germany
The West is supine before a third world dictator equipped with gas stations and nuclear weapons.
... The Russian bombardment on Sunday night included 355 drones, Yuriy Ihnat, head of the Ukrainian air force’s communications department, told The Associated Press.
The previous night, Russia fired 298 drones and 69 missiles of various types at Ukraine in what Ukrainians said was the largest combined aerial assault during the conflict. From Friday to Sunday, Russia launched around 900 drones at Ukraine, officials said. ...
Russia has this month broken its record for aerial bombardments of Ukraine three times. ...
Sunday, May 25, 2025
Canes mortui sunt
Russia hits Ukraine with the largest drone-and-missile attack of the war so far, killing at least 12
... The scale of the onslaught was stunning — Russia hit Ukraine with 367
drones and missiles, making this the largest single aerial attack of
the more than three-years-long war, according to Yuriy Ihnat, a
spokesperson for Ukraine’s Air Force.
In all, Russia used 69 missiles of various types and 298 drones, including Iranian-designed Shahed drones, he told The Associated Press. ...
Ivan Fedorenko, 80, said he regrets letting their two dogs into the house after the air raid siren went off. “They burned to death,” he said. “I want to bury them, but I’m not allowed yet.” ...
Nearly 50,000 Americans died of COVID-19 in 2023 according to the CDC, and ABC News thinks 300 a week is a headline in 2025
Why are more than 300 people in the US still dying from COVID every week?
The 350 a week rate from April is the equivalent of 18,200 annually.
Slow news day.
Wastewater analysis shows infection levels near their all-time lows.
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