30-year fixed mortgage rate tops 7% for the first time in over a year
Thursday, September 10, 2026
Middle East tanker transits Sep 2-9, 2026: Strait of Hormuz 1.5/day, Bab-el-Mandeb Strait 13.0/day
Ah, an 8-day table instead of a 7-day.
Not gonna catch me dividing by a smaller number, no-sir-ee.
This JMIC Advisory Note leads off with no fewer than 8 ship incidents, 5 of which were U.S. CENTCOM disabling actions.
For the tanker table please go here:
Joint Maritime Information Center Update 095 JMIC Advisory Note 10 September
Meanwhile at this hour . . .
WTI $102.87
BRENT $108.16
USA GASOLINE $4.27
Overall wholesale prices in August 2026 are up 5.4% year over year, core up 4.62%
Not seasonally adjusted:
PPIFID January - August 2026:
3.07, 3.36, 4.28, 5.69, 5.91, 5.57, 4.84, 5.44
PPICOR January - August 2026:
3.71, 3.83, 3.94, 4.91, 4.49, 4.79, 4.25, 4.62
Trump I PPICOR average 1.88
2025 average 3.28
2026 to date 4.31
There is plenty of housing available, but year over year sales in August are up only on homes priced more than $1 million
New houses are selling at an annualized rate of 607,000 in July 2026, with 488,000 available in July and supply at 9.6 months.
Existing homes are selling at an annual rate of 3.98 million in August with 1.62 million available and supply at 4.9 months.
Highest supply in a decade for existing homes indicates sellers are asking too much.
You know what to do.
Home sales fall in August despite the highest supply in over a decade
... Sales of previously owned homes fell 2% in August from July to 3.98 million units on a seasonally adjusted, annualized basis, according to the National Association of Realtors.
... Housing supply totaled 1.62 million homes for sale at the end of August, up 3.2% from July and up 5.9% from the year before. At the current sales pace, that represents a 4.9-month supply — the highest level in over a decade, according to NAR.
Despite more supply, prices continue to rise. The median price of a home sold in august was $429,100, up 1.6% from August 2025. That is a new record high for the month of August.
... Homes are sitting on the market longer, averaging 31 days in August compared with 29 days in July. ...
C'mon man, the Fed has bought trillion$ in U.S. Treasury securities and can't keep yields down, how is the Treasury buying billion$ going to do anything?
This is nothing but another gimmick in a long line of gimmicks, brought to you by the unserious.
Serious governments attack high interest rate problems by cutting spending and raising taxes.
Neither American political party has had the courage to do those things in decades because Democrats demand endless spending to reduce endless poverty and Republicans demand endless tax cuts to stimulate endless lousy economic growth.
Bessent’s political turn in GOP speech tests his bond-market credibility
... His speech comes against the backdrop of the Treasury Department on Wednesday saying it would buy back as much as $6 billion in long-term Treasury debt this week, with a cap of at least $4 billion in operations later this year. The department began the buyback program in 2024 to solve a well-documented problem where trading can be thin for some long-term debt. ...
10Y yield at this hour is 4.92%.
20Y is 5.36%.
30Y is 5.351%.
And 2Y is at 4.514%, a 52-week high like the rest.
ECB playing catch up to reality, as always
ECB hikes interest rates to 2.5% as policymakers see risk of higher inflation, weaker growth
... Eurozone inflation hit 3.3% in August, with energy inflation spiking to 14.3%. ...
10Y yields at this hour:
Germany 3.4777%
France 4.382%
Expected inflation makes into the headline, not the not-expected inflation
Wholesale prices rose 0.4% in August, as expected
... On an annual basis, that put PPI at 5.4%, still well above the Fed’s 2% inflation target and 0.1 percentage point higher than expected. ...
Wednesday, September 9, 2026
The stuff you see on Drudge is just a joke
Drudge and more importantly the Washington Examiner should be ashamed of themselves for putting up this crap.
The Iran war and $40 trillion debt just made Chinese bonds look safe
by William Nye, student and columnist from Australia
Yeah, Chinese bonds look so safe that China itself owns TWO TIMES MORE UST than foreigners hold of China's own goddam government bonds, and both sums are tiny little dwarfs compared with the $40 trillion U.S. government debt market.
Foreigners own $0.2962 trillion of Chinese government debt as of mid-2026.
China in June owned $0.6334 trillion of U.S. government debt at the very same time.
Meanwhile foreigners altogether owned $9.299 trillion of U.S. debt in June.
Bonds are only as good as the people backing them and as good as the government which can tax them to pay them off.
Individual median disposable income in the United States in 2023 was more than EIGHT TIMES higher than in China at $38,110 compared with China at $4,588.
In America tax compliance on wages and salaries is nearly 100%.
In China you need to roll out the tanks.
Stupid people read these stupid headlines and stupid articles and stay stuck on stupid.
Too often that leads to getting stuck to the pavement.
Tuesday, September 8, 2026
Republicans warming to Social Security tax hikes: Sen. Bernie Moreno, Rep. Tom Cole, Rep. Lloyd K. Smucker, Sen. Mike Crapo
As Social Security fund runs dry, some Republicans say it’s time to raise taxes
... But Cole, at least, said he thinks the political blowback from Social Security benefit cuts would be far worse than a comprehensive solution that includes raising taxes.
“I love Grover [Norquist]. But … you’ve got to deal with Social Security,” Cole said. “And believe me, you’ll have a lot bigger problem if it goes bankrupt than you’ll have keeping it whole, because people will feel cheated.” ...
Tom Cole is right. Just fix the damn thing.
A person who has contributed the maximum every year since 1983 has accumulated about $475,000 including the employer match. At a current maximum monthly benefit draw of about $5.1k, that sum is exhausted in just under eight years, if he lives that long.
The wage cap for Social Security taxes paid by such a person has not been pegged to inflation. It's been higher than that. Had it been pegged only to inflation since 1983, Social Security taxes today would top out at $120k of wages instead of $184,500.
The wage cap tracks the national average wage index. And Medicare taxes are not capped at all and capture all income.
If it's true that the intent of indexing to the national average wage index was to capture 90% of all aggregated U.S. earnings, a future fix should include an increase to the wage cap to close the gap which has developed. Today's cap captures only 83% of aggregated income.
In other words, the wage cap, even though it rose much higher than the rate of inflation since 1983, still did not rise high enough.
We should fix that and move the wage cap higher as indicated, but we should not remove the wage cap entirely, which would sever the connection between contributions and benefits. That means raising the wage cap to $300,000 and creating a mechanism for automatic increases to maintain the 90% standard.
That would be in addition to raising the retirement age gradually from 67 to 69, and immediately raising the payroll tax to 7.2% from 6.2%.
Just do it.
Monday, September 7, 2026
NBC News: Labor share of business income falls to historic lows as corporate profits explode
Rob Wile
Since 2000, the value of the S&P 500 stock index has gained about 600%. Over the same period, inflation-adjusted worker earnings have climbed just 12.5%.
It is now the least rewarding time to be a worker in the U.S. economy since the government started keeping track.
The
share of economic growth captured by labor in the form of compensation
like wages fell to a record low last quarter, hitting 52.8%, according
to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which began recording the statistic
in 1947.
In other words, even as the economy continues to grow, worker pay comprises an ever smaller slice of the pie.
The data comes as stock prices continue to hover near all-time highs, while wage growth is barely keeping up with inflation.
On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that wage growth slowed to its lowest rate in five years in August and remains below the broader pace of price growth.
It’s the latest data point reflecting a decades-long stagnation in returns to labor, while corporate profits have exploded.
Since approximately the start of this century, the S&P 500 stock index has gained about 600%. Over the same period, inflation-adjusted worker earnings have climbed just 12.5%.
Wages vs. inflation
Since April, the prices consumers pay are rising faster than wages.
What’s driving it all?
Economists aren’t really certain about the exact cause, but a confluence of factors appears to be at work, according to Mike Konczal, vice president of policy and research at the Economic Security Project and a former White House chief economist in the Biden administration.
The start of the century coincided with what is known as the “China Shock,” as Beijing’s entry into the World Trade Organization massively accelerated globalization and offshoring.
The shock chipped away at the number of traditional blue-collar workers in the U.S., and it reduced the bargaining power of those who remained.
Meanwhile, technological advances have allowed the typical worker to generate larger volumes of more valuable services.
But those gains are being captured as company profits, not as wage growth.
The trend appeared to reverse, or at least stabilize, for a brief period during the post-pandemic economic reopening. But exactly why that happened is still not entirely clear.
The decline resumed after President Donald Trump returned to office in 2025.
Konczal said some economists believe corporations have sought to increase their profit margins at the expense of higher wages for workers in order compensate for the economic uncertainty that Trump’s tariff policies have created.
Regardless of the specific reasons behind the renewed drop in gains for labor, the decline has implications for all of society, Konczal said.
It stands to increase wealth inequality by putting more resources in the hands of capital owners — namely stock market investors — while the returns to workers stagnate.
It also has fiscal implications: Konczal said efforts to increase taxes on wealth or corporate profits have proved politically untenable so far, compared with the current arrangement of taxing earned income and wages instead.
“The economy can start to become unequal in a way that it’s not just the CEO who makes more, but people who own shares do, and that wealth is very, very unequal,” he said.
Middle East tanker transits 30 August - 5 September, 2026 per UKMTO JMIC Update 094: Strait of Hormuz 0.9/day, Bab-el-Mandeb Strait 11.9/day
WTI: $92.95
BRENT: $97.61
GASOLINE USA: $4.09
Sunday, September 6, 2026
In July 1978 60% of teenagers 16-19 years old worked, but in August 2026 only 32.8% do
Bring back the cult of work.
There were 25.89 million prime working age people 25-54 years of age in America just like Abdul who didn't work in August 2026, but Abdul says we have a cult of work
We have 11.76 million teenagers 16-19 years old, 7.45 million college kids 20-24 years old, 25.89 million core adults 25-54 years old, and 67.63 million people 55 or older, all of whom did not work in August 2026.
That's over 112 million eating but not working.
They can't all work, obviously, but if each group lived up to its own past peak performance, 13.27 million more across all groups could in fact be working who are not working.
That 13.27 million more working is just 11.8% more.
GDP sucks in part because we aren't working up to our past potential.
As I incessantly point out, the key to a happy life is a full time job, because it allows you to arbitrage it for a car, a home, a spouse, and children.
Peak full time in America was in July 2000 when 54.67% had a full time job. In August 2026 just 49.14% did. The difference between those two points at current population is an extra 15.2 million full time jobs which we don't presently have.
America is a much bigger place now than in July 2000, too, by 63 million in civilian non-institutional population. Shouldn't that also make us stronger?
Do we really think an extra 15 million out of 112 million is dreaming the impossible dream?
We need leaders who don't think so.
But this guy . . .
Saturday, September 5, 2026
Middle East tanker transits per UKMTO JMIC Update 093, August 27-September 2, 2026: Strait of Hormuz 1.0/day, Bab-el-Mandeb Strait 9.4/day
WTI: $91
BRENT: $96
GASOLINE USA: $4.12
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