Sunday, November 13, 2022
Saturday, November 12, 2022
Salena Zito is obviously channeling Peggy Noonan: The women recommend just giving up on secure chain of custody voting
The weaker sex recommends you give in. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
That right there is the whole history of conservatism, from the advent of the Progressive Era 130 years ago until now.
Currently, Democrats are miles ahead of Republicans at targeting specific races and voters. Through mail balloting, they put those voters in the bank early. ... Republicans can complain about the current rules all they want, but what they need to do is wake up and start competing with the Democrats where they are. Otherwise, they're just leaving winnable races on the table.
Florida Republicans certainly have figured it out. In 2018 and 2020, the Democrats went into Election Day with more ballots cast than Republicans in early voting. This year, Florida Republicans flipped that on its head. Republicans in other states should take note.
-- Salena Zito, in her conclusion here
It is rude of Arizona and Nevada to keep the country waiting to know the composition of its Senate. Why, days after the election, don’t we know which party controls the House? Why can’t the late-reporting states get their act together on vote counting? It’s the increase in mail-in ballots? So what? You roll with life and adapt. Florida, which spans two time zones, reports its tallies with professionalism and dispatch.
-- Peggy Noonan, from her lede here
Four true words
Trump lacked the discipline.
Stated here.
That's still the fundamental problem, but that's been the case from the beginning.
Character counts. Trump has never had it and never will. I cut my losses with Trump in 2018 when he exposed himself as a phony on his chief plank, illegal immigration. He already did that in August 2016, so fool me once, shame on Trump. I am not ashamed to state it over and over again.
The rest of the party still hasn't come around, however, with so-called conservatives still yammering on about stuff like pOPuLiSm. But that's because opposition to illegal immigration was never a GOP value. The GOP would never be upset because he lied about that.
It's hard to imagine the GOP pointing to anything in particular which was a line too far. 121 voted in the House to object to the 2020 Arizona vote, 138 to the Pennsylvania vote. Not even three horrible elections in a row is proving to be decisive.
Meanwhile Democrats have exploited Trump's weakness, and therefore the GOP's, to consolidate power with extraordinary new depth. The new regime of mail-in voting everywhere changes everything. The chain of custody of ballots in voting precincts is broken forever.
It's the end run around representative government we only imagined the National Popular Vote Compact would be. It's the path to pure democracy. It's the end of legislatures, the end of republicanism, and makes the tyranny of the majority and the repression of the minority the new, terrible future.
A Supreme Court in principle deferring to the states on everything from election law to drugs, marriage, abortion, gender, etc. is no bulwark against what's coming, indeed, what's already here.
The people will decide by referendum.
The people be damned.
Friday, November 11, 2022
Clearly the interest rate beatings will have to continue until stock market morale improves
It's a small point, but the stock market cheerleaders, who are ubiquitous, consistently report year over year inflation as 7.7% when it's 7.8%.
Nothing must get in the way of the narrative, especially convention.
Meanwhile, the inflation regime is a giant wealth transfer scheme from you to them. But student loan forgiveness was the anesthetic to make young skulls full of mush forget on Tuesday.
Thursday, November 10, 2022
The end is near: The majority increasingly uses the referendum to get what it cannot get from a legislature, and now to vote itself largess out of the public treasury
Soon it will vote quite literally to redistribute wealth from those who have it to those who have it not.
Wednesday, November 9, 2022
Michigan House, Senate, Governor's mansion, Attorney General, Secretary of State, Supreme Court all under Democrat control for first time since 1980s
This is what happens when you get 1.8 million votes by mail: a record turnout to surpass the 2018 record turnout.
For the first time in four decades, Democrats are waking up to a state in which their party controls the House and Senate – a feat not done since the early 1980s.
More.
It takes a special kind of stupid Republicanism to screw things up this bad: libertarian Republicanism, for which Michigan is famous.
The key: legislation by referendum of the people instead of by representative government; which yielded 1) easy voting by mail, instead of on election day, for which libertarians are all-in, as they are for abortion, immigration, and free-trade, same as Democrats; and 2) "nonpartisan" redistricting.
Michigan was never a conservative state, and is finished as a Republican state.
Michigan has been irretrievably Californicated in the span of four years.
Trump failed to deliver in 2018 and 2020, now his party fails to deliver in 2022
This should have been a massive wave election. Given the low job approval ratings of the sitting president in his first midterm election, and given the favorable generic congressional ballot numbers, this should have been a plus-five wave in the Senate and a plus-30 wave, or bigger, in the House. It also should have resounded down to statehouses, and yet the GOP turns out, apparently, not to have been able to beat abysmal Democrat gubernatorial candidates like Katie Hobbs, Kathy Hochul, and Gretchen Whitmer. ... Trump didn’t play the net positive role he should have, and that might be the real takeaway. ... Objectively, it’s clear that DeSantis is the future of the GOP.
Tuesday, November 8, 2022
Insurrectionists don't answer the phone, lol
Republicans this cycle are practicing the art of being ungovernable, and the progressives at The Daily Beast are frustrated as hell that no one can predict today's outcome from data:
Republicans seem less and less inclined to answer poll questions. ... It’s hard to get a truly random sample online the way you can with phone numbers. ... According to Dave Wasserman, the U.S. House editor at the Cook Political Report, the big problem is that “response rates suck. We’re down to 1 percent of people on a good day who are willing to talk to a pollster for free,” he told The Daily Beast.
Monday, November 7, 2022
Meanwhile Joe Biden and the Democrats who cut and ran from Afghanistan fell far short of military recruitment even after cutting goals
The US Army was 25% short, while all the other branches had to dip into delayed-entry recruits to make their goals for this cycle.
Active duty military fell to 1.347m in 2020 from 1.388m in 2019.
In 2021 we're down to 1.195m, a year over year decline of 11.3% and 13.9% from 2019.
Look at this fearsome lot. These supposedly still meet US Army standards.
I'm sure our enemies tremble with fear.
Crime has soared in Democrat strongholds under Biden, but the FBI is working hard to hide the data and protect their boy
The BBC reports:
There are questions about the reliability of the FBI's crime report as it excluded data from some of the biggest US cities, including New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
It's important to point out that last year, the FBI switched to a new data collection system. According to one analysis, nearly 40% of law enforcement agencies have failed to report their 2021 crime figures - so we may only have a partial picture of the most recent crime rates.
Under Joe Biden and the Democrats, border encounters are soaring since 2019 because illegal immigrants know they will likely be released into the US
Encounters have exploded by 2.4 times under Biden.
It is estimated that well over 1 million of these illegal immigrants have simply been released into the US by the Biden administration using phony interpretations of immigration law.
This does not count the illegal immigrants who have snuck in because they were missed by the border authorities overwhelmed by the consequences of the Biden administration's lax border policies.
Sunday, November 6, 2022
Full time employment averaged a surprisingly strong 50.1% for the first ten months of 2022 in Friday's report
Still lower than 2019 but pretty good given the circumstances.
Friday, November 4, 2022
The people allied with those who wanted to put you in jail for vaccine skepticism now want fOrGiVeNeSs and AmNeStY
LET’S DECLARE A PANDEMIC AMNESTY
We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. ... we need to learn from our mistakes and then let them go. We need to forgive the attacks . . ..
Get bent, lady economist from Brown University.
Despite FDA approval of mRNA COVID vaccines, you still can't sue the pharmaceutical companies, and the only government program adjudicating cases is hopelessly overwhelmed
This story is outrageous.
The bastards.
You are already completely out of luck if you received a jab more than one year ago and haven't filed a claim for an injury.
Some excerpts, but make sure to read the whole thing.
Reuters (June 16, 2022):
Part of the Health Resources and Services Administration, the CICP was designed to be “the payer of last resort” for people who suffered injuries from treatments or “countermeasures” related to “a declared pandemic, epidemic or security threat” like Ebola or anthrax. Payouts are limited to unreimbursed medical expenses and up to $50,000 a year in lost wages, with no provisions for pain and suffering or legal fees. A death benefit of $370,376 is also available.
The CICP is the only option under current law for people seeking damages for COVID-19 vaccine-related injuries.
Per a declaration under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act, the federal government indemnified the vaccine makers, which are not party to CICP proceedings. A Pfizer spokesman declined comment. Media representatives from Moderna and Johnson & Johnson did not respond to requests for comment.
Until March 2020, the CICP attracted little attention, deciding fewer than 500 cases in its entire history. It’s now drowning in a 16-fold spike in claims, with more than 5,400 COVID-19 vaccine injury cases pending. Another 2,990 allege injuries or death from other COVID-19 countermeasures, such as being placed on a ventilator. ... At the current rate of adjudication – 18 cases a month, by my calculation – it will take 38 years to get through the backlog. That’s not much help for claimants who are unable to work or pay rent right now. ...
Without exception, the CICP requires claims to be filed within one year of vaccination.
Thursday, November 3, 2022
The Fed chair was looking for evidence of transitory inflation for twelve months while actual, raging inflation was staring him in the face the whole time and he did nothing about it
In his testimony yesterday, Jerome Powell said he uses a table of the last twelve months of 12-month readings of inflation. In other words, year-over-year readings.
It showed him no evidence of inflation coming down, in other words, of inflation being "transitory".
"We're exactly where we were a year ago." In other words, yep, inflation is raging. It's not transitory.
If you aren't appalled by that, I don't know what to say.
In April 2021 inflation year over year was already at the 2008-level of bad, and the Fed chair decided to wait and see if it became a "problem".
He waited a year, until Mar 2022, to begin raising the main interest rate.
I'm sure the reason is that in April 2021 he was focused on the pandemic as the number one problem. Vaccine uptake reached its crescendo that month, and Jay was praising the COVID stimulus orgy to restart the economy.
But the pandemic wasn't his job. Stable prices is his job, and he let it slide because of the extraordinary circumstances.
Now we're in a whole other big mess. Gutting the bond market is going to be life-changing for far longer than the pandemic will be.
Here's the video from yesterday with the key interchange.
This is Trump's boy, by the way.
Wednesday, November 2, 2022
Capitol Police do another bang-up job, so to speak
Capitol Police cameras caught break-in at Pelosi home, but no one was watching...
. . . hours after Pelosi left San Francisco last week and returned to D.C., much of the security left with her, and officers in Washington stopped continuously monitoring video feeds outside her house.
Tuesday, November 1, 2022
Democrats in Michigan incessantly advertise on YouTube against Republican John Gibbs in MI-3, featuring scarry pictures of a big, very black man with troglodyte views on women, abortion, and Medicare
Your Democrat choice in the race is a very white female, a progressive extremist who served in the Obama Injustice Department and who was defeated last time around by Peter Meijer.
My extremely stupid progressive neighbor had a sign out for the Democrat early in September until he figured out a couple of weeks later that our street had been re-districted out of MI-3.
The Democrat's campaign clothes her extremism in the glow of her Christian faith to make her more acceptable to the white, right of center, evangelical population around Grand Rapids.
On YouTube Gibbs seems to run one ad for every twenty the Democrats run.
Sunday, October 30, 2022
At 194 at the January 2022 high or 139 at the October 2022 low, it's all the same to me
Obscenely overpriced.
Saturday, October 29, 2022
We have to draw a straight line from Bernie Sanders to the Republican Congressional baseball shooting where progressive James T. Hodgkinson tried to kill 24 Republicans
There is no Wikipedia page for James T. Hodgkinson.
Distressed debt reaches $271 billion after five straight weeks of growth
Growing Pile of Distressed Debt Signals Coming US Default Wave
(Bloomberg) -- A heap of distressed debt is expanding in the US corporate bond market and investors worry that a burst of defaults will follow. The amount of dollar-denominated bonds and loans trading at levels indicating distress is the largest since September 2020, reaching $271.3 billion last week after five straight weeks of growth, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. ... the supply of distressed debt is still a fraction of the almost $1 trillion peak level in 2020 . . ..
With long-term Treasury investments down 32% year to date, and long-term investment grade down 30%, you can imagine what's happening downstream and behind the scenes.
Bloomberg cites Carnival Corp. as an example, which had to pay 6% for loans in 2021 but is paying 10.75% now. That's 79% more expensive for Carnival.
Have you tried to buy a house?
A 30-yr fixed rate mortgage would have cost you on average 3.14% one year ago. Today it'll cost you 7.08%, an increase of over 125%.
Do you own stocks?
You are still down over 18% year to date despite the 7% rebound in October.
The recent stock market rally can be rightly viewed as part of an orderly selling process which has been underway all year. The March high failed the January high, and the August high failed the March high. The current rally is unlikely to succeed the August high. It has to be remembered this is all occurring in the context of a rising interest rate environment, which is negative for stocks, housing, and bonds.
Bull market advocates, who have stocks to sell to you, don't forget, have persistently ignored the distorting effects of Fed interest rate suppression. In fact, they've counted on that suppression. They call it the Fed Put. They laugh at these puny Fed rate hikes, and make gazillions off the inflation trade. Now they're ignoring the unwind, too, which is affecting all debt. Stocks are debts, too, don't forget. Up or down, they make money off the direction. The bull market cheerleaders are worse than used car salesmen.
October 31 marks the end of the fiscal year for investment companies, who have dividends to distribute by calendar year's end to avoid taxation as registered investment companies. In an already down year, they have had a huge incentive to finish the fiscal year on as strong a note as possible. That may account for the strong October for stocks.
Normally the investment companies would be selling their losers by October 31 for tax-loss harvesting purposes. If that's happening you wouldn't know it from the monthly view of the S&P 500 in October. The DOW and the Russell 2000 were up even more. Even the NASDAQ is up in October.
But the S&P 500 low of the year did occur on October 12 at 3577, ringed by heavy selling on Sep 30 and Oct 14, after which it has been elevator up. That was probably the tax-loss harvesting for fiscal 2022.
In any event rising interest rates remain negative for the bond market, the housing market, and for stocks. The consequences of massive debt repricing are only just beginning to be felt. Stocks will hold out the longest because they can. First the bonds, then the housing, then the stocks. The rest of us are just collateral damage.
The expected 0.75 point Fed interest rate decision is Wednesday, November 2, less than one week before the election. Don't expect the Fed to do more than this, even though they damn well ought.
Friday, October 28, 2022
Thursday, October 27, 2022
Fed Chair Ben Bernanke once famously said on 60 Minutes that if inflation ever got out of control they could raise interest rates in 15 minutes
The first Fed rate hike under Powell came in March when inflation was already way out of control, and Americans began loading up their charge cards at 18-28% interest to cope.
That's even more insane to me than the inflation.
The main Fed interest rate is still at 3.08% today, the rate available only to the banks, the same guys who pay you 0% interest, with inflation just cruising along up there above 8%.
It took the Fed over a year to move. A year. And then by just 0.75 points at a time, which the stock market parasites screamed bloody murder about.
Pretty amazing to me that ordinary folks aren't screaming, aren't mad as hell, and seem to be prepared to just swallow and take it some more.
I guess the fight has been bred out of the American people.
Sad!
Wednesday, October 26, 2022
The Treasury yield curve compresses narrowly into a thin thread before recessions, so it looks like one is imminent
Yield across the board right now is in the 4s except for one and two month money. The one year is the leader, roughly in the middle of the pack, around which the other rates have been organizing.
Interestingly enough, compound annual growth of nominal GDP since the year 2000 22 years ago has come in at 4.18% through 2Q on 2Q. The 30-yr tonight is yielding 4.19%. This looks like rate normalization to me because rates are compressing in that vicinity, finally commensurate with actual economic growth, after the pitiful all-time-low average annual 30-yr yield in 2020 at 1.56%. We haven't had a 4% average 30-yr yield since 2010.
Given the extraordinary interventions by the US Federal Reserve over the period to suppress interest rates, we may see them explode the other way given the length and depth of the distortions. Trillions upon trillions of US Dollar denominated debt was sold at those repressed prices. In 2020 alone we're talking about $2.9 trillion in 2-10yr Treasury notes, not counting the short end bills and the long end bonds, all yielding well under 1%. It could get really ugly.
Recession doesn't always happen right away, but the signal is pretty clear. It seemed to take forever in the late 1990s.
As always, click images to enlarge.
Recessions are in gray.
And as always, this is not investment advice.
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| daily view through 10/25/22 |
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| monthly view through Sep 2022 |
Tuesday, October 25, 2022
The entire US Treasury yield curve bows and worships at the feet of the 1-year Treasury for an eighth day now, and you know what that means
When the upstart 1-year tries to compete with the long end, you in for a heap a trouble boy.
Yippee-ki-yay.
Sunday, October 23, 2022
Sunday morning comedy from CNBC
Detroit, Tulsa, Memphis, and Oklahoma City
Pack the bags, honey! We're moving!
Saturday, October 22, 2022
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