4-week moving averages, initial claims monthly average, continued claims biweekly average:
Thursday, June 26, 2025
Wednesday, June 25, 2025
Federal Reserve floats proposal to ease bank capital requirements which were increased in the wake of the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, Fed Governors Kugler and Barr in opposition
... The Fed board put the proposal open for a 60-day public comment window.
In its draft form, the measure would call for reducing the top-tier capital big banks must hold by 1.4%, or some $13 billion, for holding companies. Subsidiaries would see a larger drop, of $210 billion, which would still be held by the parent bank. The standard applies the same rules to so-called globally systemic important banks as well as their subsidiaries.
The rule would lower capital requirements to range of 3.5% to 4.5% from the current 5%, with subsidiaries put in the same range from a previous level of 6%. ...
However, Governors Adriana Kugler and Michael Barr, the former vice chair of supervision, said they would oppose the move.
“Even if some further Treasury market intermediation were to occur in normal times, this proposal is unlikely to help in times of stress,” Barr said in a separate statement. “In short, firms will likely use the proposal to distribute capital to shareholders and engage in the highest return activities available to them, rather than to meaningfully increase Treasury intermediation.” ...
Methinks J. D. Vance doth protest too much about Jerome Powell
It backfired on Powell, though.
Yields climbed in response. 10Y went from 3.63 on Sep 16 to 4.37 by Nov 1. And core PCE inflation shot back up.
It's proof yet again that the Fed has next to no control over interest rates. It's one of the great myths of our time that it does, a myth Vance believes.
If Powell had cut and Kamala won, irrespective of what rates or inflation did, Vance might have an argument. He should quit complaining and take the win.
Meanwhile core PCE inflation was 2.66 in Sep 2024, same as it was in Mar 2025.
You'd think twice about trying that again, too, if you got burned like that, especially if you're being hectored by the tag-team wrestlers of the Oval Orifice.
Tuesday, June 24, 2025
Food items making new all time high average prices in the United States in May 2025
All prices are FRED data from the St. Louis Fed in U.S. dollars.
Ground Chuck 6.018/lb
Coffee 7.931
White Sugar 1.054
Bananas 0.655
Potato Chips 6.731
Ice Cream 6.466/half gallon
100% Ground Beef 5.981/lb
All Uncooked Ground Beef 6.245
American Cheese 5.063
Beer 1.834/pint
Because the BBB is a GOP Christmas tree of policy-change goodies masquerading as a reconciliation bill
This was taken down pretty early this morning by the suck-ups at Real Clear Politics. I guess the bosses come in a little later than the help.
This is arguably one of the best discussions of what is really going on that you will find.
The estimate of the Senate Finance Committee’s tax provisions reflect
a cost of $441 billion over ten years, according to the Joint Committee
on Taxation’s estimate over the weekend.
How, you might ask, could the Finance Committee have extended all the
Trump tax cuts, expanded some of them, added a bunch of other new tax
cuts, made some temporary business tax cuts permanent, and still only
cost $441 billion? The trims to clean-energy tax credits and other
rollbacks, you would presume, weren’t SO costly that they would nearly
wipe out all of the costs!
The answer, friends, is a big gimmick known as the current policy baseline.
Senate Republicans are claiming that, because the Trump tax cuts are in
place now, as current policy, it costs $0 to extend them. An analogy
would be if Congress passed a bill to institute Medicare for All for one
day, at the cost of $4 to $8 billion,
depending on your estimate, and then the next day they passed a bill
extending M4A permanently, which would cost … nothing. The same
Republicans who would scream bloody murder at that dastardly maneuver
are the ones now employing this absurd maneuver.
The reality is that the Trump tax cuts, under a current law baseline
that compares the policy to the change to current law, really cost
$3.76 trillion over ten years. If you add that to the $441 billion
estimate, you have a tax section that costs over $4.2 trillion. This is
$400 billion higher than the House version that the Freedom Caucus
already found intolerable, and that some self-styled Republican budget
hawks in the Senate are grumbling about. ...
In most cases, the parliamentarian looks at whether provisions have a purely budgetary purpose, rather than policy dressed up as a budget item. (This is known as the Byrd Rule, after the longtime Democratic senator from West Virginia, Robert Byrd; the process by which the parties debate the provisions and by which a ruling is made is known as the “Byrd bath.”) ...
For context, the House version costs $3.3 trillion over a decade, according to the latest estimates. We’re verging on $4 trillion for the Senate bill—unless the Republicans’ wish to have the $3.7 trillion in tax cuts entered as zero passes muster with the parliamentarian. ...
Update Wed Jun 25:
Real Clear Politics put this back up in the rotation this morning, lol.
Mark Levin is right, can't understand why Trump is throwing Iran's Nazi leader a lifeline
Because Trump is weak, Mark. It's a failure of nerve. He doesn't have the right stuff.
Iran should be forced to sign a surrender document. Unconditional surrender. They lost their nukes, they’ve lost their air force, they have no ground-to-air protection. China didn’t step in, Russia didn’t step in, not a single Arab country stepped in. The Supreme Nazi is hiding in a bunker much like Adolf Hitler did. Adolf Hitler wasn’t thrown a lifeline. He wasn’t thrown a lifeline. He was going to be killed, so he committed suicide.
More.
Yeah, what a hero Trump is, they should give him the Nobel Peace Prize
From the suck-ups at Real Clear Politics this morning:
Monday, June 23, 2025
Iran is now but a shadow of its former self
Iran's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Sunday, June 22, 2025
Islamist suicide bombers kill at least 20 Christians, wound many more, during mass in Damascus church a day after the U.S. attacks on Iran's nuclear enrichment sites
 |
| At the Mar Elias Church in the Dweila neighborhood of Syria's capital Damascus on Sunday. |
Mouth-breather Marco: By the time we left we were already gone lol
He could be our Yogi Berra redivivus, but just hasn't got the C H A R M.
Saturday, June 21, 2025
The U.S. Senate parliamentarian still has not ruled on the GOP's wacky current policy vs. current law baseline
The current policy is the temporary Trump tax cuts from 2017.
The current law is the tax compromise worked out by Barack Obama and John Boehner.
I don't think this thing is going to be done by the Fourth of July.
GOP’s food stamp plan is found to violate Senate rules. It’s the latest setback for Trump’s big bill
... The parliamentarian’s office is tasked with scrutinizing the bill to ensure it complies with the so-called Byrd Rule, which is named after the late Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., and bars many policy matters in the budget reconciliation process now being used. ...
Some of the most critical rulings from parliamentarians are still to come. One will assess the GOP’s approach that relies on “current policy” rather than “current law” as the baseline for determining whether the bill will add to the nation’s deficits. ...
The truth is buried in the very last paragraph: Obama's war on coal did this to us
... certain facilities like old fossil-fuel powered plants have been decommissioned and new energy capacity to replace it has been relatively slow to come online ...
The example most detrimental to U.S. and U.S. presidential stature is Two Weeks Trump's ridiculous coddling of Vladimir Putin at the expense of Ukraine for two months
... Over the last two months, Trump has said repeatedly that various answers to questions about the war, including U.S. assistance to Ukraine, would be just two weeks away.
On April 24, he told a reporter who asked about continued military assistance for Ukraine: "You can ask that question in two weeks, and we'll see." He gave a similar answer days later when asked if he trusted Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he had publicly criticized in recent months.
Those weeks came and went. And on May 19, when asked if Ukraine was doing enough to support U.S.-led cease-fire negotiations, Trump replied, "I'd rather tell you in about two weeks from now because I can't say yes or no."
Over a month ago, on May 28, Trump gave Putin another two-week deadline when a reporter asked whether he believed the Russian leader truly wants the war to end.
"I can't tell you that, but I'll let you know within two weeks," Trump said. "We're going to find out whether or not he's tapping us along or not. And if he is, we'll respond a bit differently, but it will take about a week and a half, two weeks." ...
Last Wednesday marked three weeks, and still bupkis from Trump.
It's been two months, not two weeks.
More.
Maureen Dowd: This is the moment when we find out just how mad a king Donald Trump is
... As the “No Kings” resistance among Democrats bristles, and as President Trump continues to defy limits on executive power, it is instructive to examine comparisons of President Trump to George III. ...
Atkinson said that the only similarity between the pious monarch and the impious monarch manqué is “the use of the military against their own people to enforce the king’s will. There are incidents, the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party.”
He added: “This proclivity for using armed forces for domestic suppression of dissent. That’s a slippery slope in this country. It led to an eight-year war when George did it, and Lord knows where it’s going to lead this time.” ...
“The fact that we’re looking for a monarch to draw parallels to him is telling in and of itself, because that’s not what we do. That’s what the whole shooting match was about in the 1770s.”
Friday, June 20, 2025
The more things change, the more the fascist U.S. system of corporate welfare does not
... In the race to attract large data centers, states are forfeiting hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue, according to a CNBC analysis. Among the beneficiaries of these exemptions are tech giants such as Amazon, Meta and Google, which all have market caps of over $1 trillion.
Tax breaks have long been a tool states use to compete for businesses. However, watchdog groups said that for data centers the tradeoffs are iffy, because the facilities don’t tend to create large numbers of jobs, while the amount of electricity required can be immense.
The growing number of tax breaks has sparked a debate about whether massive corporations should be receiving these generous incentives. ...
Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, a nonprofit research group that tracks corporate subsidies and advocates for transparency and accountability in economic development, has spent more than a decade examining the impact of exemptions nationwide. He said the clear winners are the Big Tech companies.
“There was a giant transfer of wealth from taxpayers to shareholders,” LeRoy told CNBC. “Some states, like Virginia, are headed toward billion-dollar annual losses.” ...
LeRoy calls it a losing proposition for taxpayers.
“When tax breaks don’t pay for themselves, only two things can happen: Either public services are reduced in quality, or everybody’s taxes go up in other ways if you’re going to try to keep things the same in terms of quality of public services,” he said. ...
Meanwhile, known corporate welfare, in the form of tax abatements and subsidies by states and localities to attract businesses to come and bring jobs, is presently estimated at in excess of $417 billion. The real total is probably far higher given that local data is poor relative to state disclosures.
The data, incomplete as it may be, shows just ten states where we're talking about only "hundreds of millions" in lost tax revenue and tax loss expenditures. In the rest we're talking about billions, even tens of billions.
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