The June and July levels above 1.9 million haven't been seen since November 2021.
If they lived through that, we can live through this, and we will.
I don't remember why I started doing this chart in May of whenever it was, but I stuck with it over the years.
It was probably some nutball during the Great Financial Crisis screaming that foreigners were dumping U. S. Treasury securities and we were all doomed!
The nutballs have been saying that for a loooooooooooooong time.
These are the raw, as-reported numbers at the time, and do not incorporate any subsequent revisions.
In May 2025, 43% of the over $9 trillion in outstanding value for foreign held UST was "Official", that is, by governments. And 89.8% of that 43% is invested in longer term Notes and Bonds.
Year over year in May the value of what is owned by foreigners is up a whopping 11.25%.
Many people in addition to governments around the world are banking on the full faith and credit of the United States because they can't really bank on their own governments.
And that's a fact, Jack.
Core personal consumption expenditures year over year have been stuck in a range of 2.78% year over year for eighteen long months.
This is shaping up to become the regrettable new normal.
Core pce had averaged just 1.50% year over year for twelve years from 2009-2020 inclusive. The rate has been 85% higher than that for a year and a half now on an average basis.
The 2.78% rate is but little lower than the 2024 average of 2.81%, and the 2.75% average for the first six months of 2025 still rounds up to 2.8%.
You remember 2024. Joe Biden was president, and so far in 2025 he might as well still be.
Inflation is the worst tax. Unfortunately it's the Uniparty's policy.
The seasonally-adjusted annual rate of Trump's tariffs leaped from $96 billion in 1Q to $266 billion in 2Q.
The federal government farts through $20 billion every day, so this annualized tariff revenue goes Poof in less than two weeks, matching just 3.6% of federal outlays.
The numbskulls in the US Senate like Josh Hawley want to redistribute these tax revenues in the form of rebate checks to the taxpayers.
Wouldn't it have been easier and more efficient and more fair not to have taxed us in the first place?
Note that Donald Trump's Bureau of Economic Analysis, run by Howard Lutnick, still must call this what it is, taxes on imports lol, despite what his Treasury Secretary was still saying in June:
Bessent claims tariffs aren’t taxes.
The real GDP report is out and it looks pretty good at 3% for the first estimate for 2Q2025, especially in comparison with the -0.5% result for 1Q.
If only it were so.
From the second quarter of 2017, the year when Trump's tax reform became law on December 22nd, until now real GDP has grown at a compound annual rate of just 2.456%. For the seventy years before that, the compound annual rate of growth was 3.182%.
Trump's so-called pro-growth tax reform fell short by almost 23%.
The problem remains the lingering after effects of the Great Recession, the Great Financial Crisis, the Housing Bubble, whatever you want to call it. The Trump tax reform of 2017 didn't really do anything to address it meaningfully, just as Obama didn't, and also Biden in his turn.
From 2Q2008 to 2Q2025, the compound annual rate of real GDP growth has been just 1.99% vs. 3.421% for the sixty-one years prior to that, starting in 2Q1947.
America remains 42% behind its old self.
That's why everyone is unhappy, but especially the young. They desperately feel the futility of the situation, encumbered as so many of them are with student loan debt for the degrees which are not translating into the key to the future.
That's the sad reality of where we are, and where we are likely to stay for the foreseeable future.
But as always, the first step is admitting you have a problem instead of trying to put lipstick on that pig.
... The 9:25 p.m. update listed a 5.7 feet wave in Kahului, 4.9 feet in Hilo, 3.9 feet in Hanalei, 2.3 feet in Makapuu, 1.2 feet in Waianae and 1.1 feet in Honolulu. Other Hawaii areas listed were about 1 foot or less.
Television footage showed some flooding in parking lots in Hilo Bay and Hanalei, but no significant damage has been reported. ...
More.
The goods trade deficit in May was $96 billion, in June $85 billion.
The only thing that's changed is consumers are now being taxed on those trade deficits. The numbskulls of the GOP U. S. Senate are proposing rebates of these taxes to the people paying them.
It's all completely ludicrous.
It would have been easier simply not to have imposed the taxes in the first place.
If there's a way to lower the standard of living of American consumers, Mad King Ludwig is sure to find it.
President Donald Trump on Monday reduced to less than two weeks his deadline for Russian President Vladimir Putin to either reach a peace deal with Ukraine or face massive “secondary tariffs” on Moscow’s trade partners.
Trump previously gave Putin a 50-day deadline, which was set to expire in early September.
But he said Monday that the U.S. does not see “any progress being made.” ...
I remember the days when every grocery item came with a price tag.
When those went away there was an outcry, saying shelf pricing would be manipulated to get you to buy the item at a lower displayed price but charge you more for it at the register because the price displayed was wrong.
You used to get the item for free if that happened.
Now it happens all the time, but all you get is a refund for the difference, IF YOU STAND IN LINE AT CUSTOMER SERVICE TO GET IT.
Every transaction is going to become a negotiation like we're a goddamn third world country.
... As Heritage Board Chairman Barb Gaby and President Kevin Roberts wrote in their note to staff, alumni, and the many friends gained over the past 52 years:
Ed believed in addition, not subtraction. Unity, not uniformity. One of his favorite mantras was ‘You win through multiplication and addition, not through division and subtraction.’ His legacy is not just the institution he built, but the movement he helped grow — a movement rooted in faith, family, freedom, and the Founding.
Feulner’s words contain practical wisdom. In this era of political polarization and cultural fragmentation, they continue to serve us as a powerful tactical roadmap. In the spirit of self-governance, they call for a movement that grows by building coalitions, not by purging dissent; that persuades rather than polarizes; and that unites Americans around shared values rather than dividing them by ideology. ...
More.
Editorial: Trump must act quickly to avert a harvest crisis
With harvest season about to begin in earnest, farmers are desperate for laborers to pick their fruit and vegetables. Already in the Pacific Northwest, much of the cherry crop was left to rot because of the shortage of agricultural workers.
The crisis will soon roll into Michigan, where apples, cherries, blueberries, asparagus and other crops are rapidly ripening. Hand-picked specialty crops are a $6.3 billion industry in Michigan, supporting 41,000 jobs.
The shortage of farm workers has been building for years, due to an aging agricultural workforce, competition from more lucrative and less grueling jobs and restrictions on immigrant labor.
This year, it is exacerbated by the Trump administration's crackdown on unauthorized immigrants and the deportation of those who have entered the country illegally.
Estimates are that 42% of farm workers are undocumented migrants. Recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids on farms employing migrants have frightened away many of those workers from the fields where they had been working.
But the work they do hasn't gone away. Fruit and vegetables still need to be harvested. If they're not, it will lead to food waste, shortages and higher prices on the grocery shelves.
When asked about the worker shortage, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said the solution lies in greater mechanization of farms and matching the 34 million able bodied Americans who must find jobs or lose their Medicaid benefits with farmers who need workers.
While Rollins is correct that those who can work should be expected to, it's doubtful even the risk of losing health care benefits will coax the jobless into hot, backbreaking farm work.
Her solutions will take time and large capital investments. They won't save this year's harvest.
The Trump administration must take emergency action to assure there are enough workers to bring in the crops this summer and fall.
Rather than deporting migrants willing to fill essential jobs such as harvesting, the administration should grant them seasonal visas and a no-deportation guarantee as long as they are working on farms.
Beyond that, reform is needed for the H-2A visa program that allows farmers to legally employ temporary workers from another country. The application process is too complex and time-consuming. It must be simplified; farmers need help now.
Also at issue is the federal mandatory minimum wage for H-2A visa holders, now set at $18.50 an hour. That's nearly $8 an hour higher than the state minimum wage in Michigan. When added to housing and other costs for these workers, many farmers have to limit their use of the visas.
Longer term, resources should be devoted to recruiting domestic workers for the agriculture industry. Farmers are also being encouraged to raise wages for native-born workers, add benefits and improve working conditions.
All of that is expensive and will inevitably show up in grocery prices. But so will the shortages caused by allowing crops to rot in fields.
The most sensible option for this season is to back off deportation of farm workers while solutions are pursued for either replacing them or giving them legal status.
House Freedom Caucus: How We're Delivering For Taxpayers in July 2025 | Opinion
... By applying relentless pressure, providing education to the public, and offering alternative solutions, the HFC helped secure significant savings for the American people in the final piece of legislation. ... The national debt now stands at a staggering $37 trillion and is rising by nearly $2 trillion annually.
In fourteen business days the national debt is up half a trillion dollars to $36.7 trillion from $36.2 trillion on July 3rd.
Fourteen days.
They can't even tell the truth about that.
COVID-19 Is Rising Again. Here’s What to Know
As much as we want to put it behind us, COVID-19 isn’t going away. Cases are currently rising across the country in a summer surge. ...
I got ur summer surge right here lol:
... John Ioannidis, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and the study’s first author, said: “I think early estimates were based on many parameters having values that are incompatible with our current understanding.
“In principle, targeting the populations who would get the vast majority of the benefit and letting alone those with questionable risk-benefit and cost-benefit makes a lot of sense.
“Aggressive mandates and the zealotry to vaccinate everyone at all cost were probably a bad idea.”
More than 13 billion Covid vaccine doses have been administered since 2021. But there have been mounting concerns that vaccines could be harmful for some people, particularly the young, and that the risk was not worth the benefit for a population at little risk from Covid. ...
The over-70s made up nearly 70 per cent of the lives saved, while those aged 60 to 70 accounted for a further 20 per cent. In contrast, under-20s made up just 0.01 per cent of lives saved, and 20 to 30s were 0.07 per cent. ...
The new research was published in Jama Health Forum.
The S&P 500 averaged 6,029.95 in June.
Using 1Q2025 GDP, current valuation of SPX 6,388.64 is 213, 163% higher than the 1938-2019 mean of 81.
Full year valuations around 213 were last seen in 1928-1930: 204, 248, and 228.
Real return since August 2000 through June 2025, two months shy of 25-years, is now up to 5.08% per annum vs. 10.75% per annum October 1975 through August 2000.
The mouse that roared.
