Saturday, June 28, 2025
Trump is the Uniparty, floats an Iran policy similar to Obama's
... The potential deal would mark a major reversal in policy for President
Trump, who pulled the U.S. out of the Obama administration’s nuclear
deal with Iran in 2018 arguing in part that the sanctions relief and
unfreezing of Iranian assets had provided a “lifeline of cash” to the Iranian regime to continue its malign activities. ...
Friday, June 27, 2025
The weekend help has arrived early at Drudge lol
Four trillion TRILLION dollars! Now that's a lot of money!
If anyone is stuck, it's Gen Xer Peter Thiel
... I’m always anti-boomer ...
In The New York Times, here.
Thursday, June 26, 2025
The consensus estimate for today's GDP report was indeed for -0.2, instead it surprised at -0.5
First-quarter gross domestic product (GDP) growth was revised lower Thursday in light of reduced consumer spending, surprising economists.
GDP contracted by 0.5 percent on an annualized basis, 0.3 percentage points lower than the last measurement from the Commerce Department.
Economists were expecting the number to stay the same at a 0.2 percent contraction. ...
More.
Average yields at Treasury Note auctions this week have been significantly lower than at the immediately preceding auctions, indicating there has been a flight to safety on souring economic growth expectations.
Trump may get his lower interest rates . . . the hard way, lol.
1Q2025 real GDP revised down 0.3 to -0.5 in third and final estimate on an increase in imports front-loaded into 1Q to avoid Trump's tariffs
Real gross domestic product (GDP) decreased at an annual rate of 0.5 percent in the first quarter of 2025 (January, February, and March), according to the third estimate released by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the fourth quarter of 2024, real GDP increased 2.4 percent.
The decrease in real GDP in the first quarter primarily reflected an increase in imports, which are a subtraction in the calculation of GDP, and a decrease in government spending. These movements were partly offset by increases in investment and consumer spending.
Real GDP was revised down 0.3 percentage point from the second estimate, primarily reflecting downward revisions to consumer spending and exports that were partly offset by a downward revision to imports. ...
More.
Sounds like Howard Lutnick gobbledygook at the end there. Paragraph two speaks of an increase in imports. Paragraph three of a downward revision to imports.
Which is it lol?
Nominal 1Q2025 GDP clocks in at $29.962 trillion in the third estimate. SPX was at 5612 on Mar 31, yielding a crazy high stock market valuation of 187.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, which said Iran possessed 400kg of highly enriched uranium on June 12, says they'd have to go to the bomb sites to really know the extent of the damage caused by the U.S. attacks
Iran’s nuclear facilities “suffered enormous damage” from the U.S. airstrikes Saturday, but more extensive evaluation is needed, the head of the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog said Thursday.
“I think ‘annihilated’ is too much, but it has suffered enormous damage,” International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director Rafael Grossi told French broadcaster RFI. “I know there’s a lot of debate about the degree of annihilation, total destruction, and so on, what I can tell you, and I think everyone agrees on this, is that very considerable damage has been done.”
“Obviously, you have to go to the site and that is not easy, there is debris and it is no longer an operational facility,” he added.
More.
Initial claims for unemployment in June 2025 were last higher in June 2023, but yikes continued claims were last higher in Dec 2021
4-week moving averages, initial claims monthly average, continued claims biweekly average:
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.
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