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Thursday, August 14, 2025
My God, that sentence
At least Santelli told the truth
... We’re a couple seconds away, folks, from our July release of the Producer Price Index.
Headline number is– WHOPPINGLY big! Oh my goodness!
Up 9 tenths of a percent. Up 9 tenths. And if you strip out food and energy, guess what? It’s still up 9/10ths. Boy, that equals June of 22! ...
More.
Forecasters YUGELY underestimated July producer price increases, aka wholesale prices, forecasting +0.2% month over month, getting +0.9% instead lol
Hey, they're only off by a factor of 4.5x.
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 0.9% in July, much more than expected
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?
Trump the fool one year ago: We will slash electricity prices by half within twelve months, eighteen months max
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 audience in North Carolina in August 2024.
Quoted here.
Wednesday, August 13, 2025
Elon Musk's phony Doge spending cut math was basically like positing there was a $20,000 credit limit when there wasn't, canceling it and then saying, ‘I’ve just saved $20,000'
... 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.” ...
Peak drinking in 1977 coincides with peak Baby Boom turning 20 lol, now a record low 54% drink in 2025
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.
Gallup reports here:
... The highs of 68% to 71% were all recorded between 1974 and 1981. ...
This anthem made its debut in 1985:
American Enterprise Institute's Stan Veuger: Trump's pick for BLS isn't qualified
... “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. ...
More.
OMG the dumbest line in this story: people who buy trucks often use them to haul things
Well no shit, Sherlock.
The Electric Pickup Truck Boom Turned Into a Big Bust
... many electric versions just aren’t up for the task. ...
Pickup sales, first half of 2025:
EVs 35,000
Internal Combustion: 1,600,000
Rasmussen Reports' Trump Approval Index hasn't been net positive since Feb 19th, except for Mar 26th lol
They got tired of my answers and stopped calling me weeks ago.
What a pussy
What part of "Russia invaded Ukraine and keeps bombing the shit out of it" don't you understand?
this is for the president to go and get a better understanding ...
Tuesday, August 12, 2025
CPI food inflation was 2.9% year over year in July 2025 vs. the 1.86% average 2009-2020 and we're supposed to be happy that the Fed might cut interest rates in September
The current rate of food inflation is running 56% higher than the average rate for the entire prior decade and more.
Nothing would sing "we can't fix it" more than a rate cut in September, but three in the Autumn would shout "we don't care!"
Core cpi inflation year over year is back above 3% to 3.1% in July 2025, more than expected, the second consecutive monthly increase
But of course overall inflation is what CNBC wants to trumpet because there was an expectation for higher at 2.8% yoy and they got lower.
But one could just as easily say the tariffs are to blame for the higher than expected core rate at 3.1% instead of 3%.
But that wouldn't be cheerleading the markets, now would it?
Consumer prices rise 2.7% annually in July, less than expected amid tariff worries
Trump nominates Heritage Project 2025 economist to BLS, the very guy who had openly called for the firing of Erika McEntarfer at BLS after the disastrous July jobs numbers came out
If you thought the jobs numbers were unbelievable before, just wait.
... Antoni is the chief economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation and has been a longtime critic of the BLS. ...
Remember when Trump said he knew nothing about Project 2025?
Yeah, that was a good one.
Monday, August 11, 2025
The Wall Street Journal's Greg Ip observes America under Trump becoming more like China under Xi
Greg Ip
Recent examples include President Trump’s demand that Intel’s chief executive resign; the 15% of certain chip sales to China that Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices will share with Washington; the “golden share” Washington will get in U.S. Steel as a condition of Nippon Steel’s takeover; and the $1.5 trillion of promised investment from trading partners Trump plans to personally direct.
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 President Joe Biden went 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 overrode U.S. Steel’s management and shareholders to block Nippon Steel’s takeover, though his staff saw no national-security risk. Trump reversed that veto while extracting the “golden share” that he can use to influence the company’s decisions. In design and name it mimics the golden shares that private Chinese companies must issue to the CCP.
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 take a 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,” author Dan Wang writes: “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 Naughton of the University of California, San Diego has documented how China’s rapid growth since 1979 has come from market sources, not the state. As Chinese leader Xi Jinping has 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.
The U.S. hasn’t fared any better. Interventions made in the name of national security or kick-starting infant industries lead to boondoggles like Foxconn’s promised factory in Wisconsin or Tesla’s solar-panel factory in Buffalo, N.Y.
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, Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma, arguably the country’s most famous business leader, criticized Chinese regulators for stifling financial innovation. Retaliation was swift. Regulators canceled the initial public offering of Ma’s financial company, Ant Group, and eventually fined it $2.8 billion for 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.
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