Friday, October 30, 2026
Gold and silver rocked and crushed by oil
3896.10 Gold, down 10.11% ytd, up 0.17% 1Y
50.06 Silver, down 30.74% ytd, up 4.6% 1Y
103.37 WTI, a year ago 60.97 up 69.5%
Haley Stevens' fiancee: Stop blaming the Joos for the price of bananas
Haley Stevens' house is divided before it even starts.
The fiancé of Rep. Haley Stevens, D-Mich. has come out and said he cannot vote for Democratic Michigan Sen.-nominee Abdul El-Sayed, believing he is an antisemite.
Stevens, though, remains undaunted, backing the candidate for Senate. Jason Turkish, a Jewish registered Democrat, told The Detroit News he will be voting for Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers, appearing at a Rogers event sponsored by the Republican Jewish Coalition on Wednesday night at the Townsend Hotel in Birmingham, Michigan.
"I waited, and I watched and and I listened for Abdul to moderate – but he didn't moderate, he escalated," Turkish, a Michigan lawyer himself, told reporters on the sidelines of that event in a video published by The Detroit News.
"He's gotten worse, and worse and worse as this general election campaign has gone on. Rather than bringing people together he's just driven them further and further apart."
... Turkish says El-Sayed's anti-Israel rhetoric makes his community "less safe," fearing his party will bend to radicals claiming that there is a "genocide" in Gaza.
"When he says genocide over and over again, when he refuses to condemn an ad that says Jews are to blame for the price of bananas, he makes my community less safe," Turkish said. "He makes a lot of communities less safe."
... "Every time he talks about genocide, Jews get death threats," Turkish added. "We have never seen a candidate for U.S. Senate act so recklessly toward the safety of Jews in the community as we have seen from Abdul."
... "I watch him in recent weeks as he has become verbally combative with any reporter who has the gall, as he sees it, the gall to ask him about Hasan," Turkish said.
"Everything we hear from Abdul El-Sayed includes equivocation, and it includes equivocations to try to explain away hate, and there is no explaining away hate. And I predict to you that Michigan will reject this."
... Turkish is the second major figure from Stevens’ orbit to back Rogers in recent days. Her former campaign chair, attorney David Kramer, said Tuesday he also plans to vote for Rogers. Stevens endorsed El-Sayed after the primary but has not campaigned or appeared with him publicly since a unity breakfast shortly afterward.
The hysterical Peggy Noonan says Trump, whom everyone now knows to be a bumbler because of Iran, still might not bumble the overthrow of the republic?!
You've got to be kidding me.
He's been bumbling everything since he was elected in 2016. Hell, he bumbled his 2016 campaign, during which he switched from Lewandowski to Manafort to Bannon/Conway! He wasted 2017 trying to repeal and replace Obamacare. He could never get The Wall built. He lost the House in 2018. He handed the war on terror over to the Taliban! Weeks later he utterly capitulated to hysteria during the pandemic, even boasting about the spending orgy of the $2.2 trillion CARES ACT. His cosplaying revolutionaries who strolled through the Capitol in January 2021 had dinner reservations for that evening at The Olive Garden. In 2025 he launched an insane tariff regime, fought the Houthis to a draw, made our friends in The Great White North our enemies, sent ICE goons into the streets who ended up executing two Americans in broad daylight in January, and in February started this stupid war completely unprepared to finish it.
Trump has never been a threat to the Republic. He's the chief clown in a circus act. He's ten times the bungler we ever thought Obama to be.
But whatever happens Tuesday, just remember that Peggy is just fine with giving the revolutionaries of the other side power and influence.
Better to keep your head while everyone else is losing theirs.
... Mr. Trump’s problem is that everyone on both sides of the issue knows that he’s out of his depth in running a major war. They weren’t sure of that when it started.
Democrats think he went in because he’s a bumbler, Republicans think he can’t win because he’s a bumbler. Supporters and opposers of his decision are united: He’s a bumbler whose bumbling made things more expensive.
... If Tuesday yields only a small wave, it will embolden and empower the president’s attempts to undo the results. He will try—he’s Donald Trump. They rigged it! We won’t certify!
He never misses an opportunity to toy with the republic, and it didn’t start in 2020. McKay Coppins’s recent biography of Mitt Romney recounts how supporter Donald Trump reacted to Mr. Romney’s 2012 loss to Barack Obama. In transit to Mr. Romney’s victory party, “Trump sat in the dark of a helicopter, unraveling.” He decided, based on nothing, that the election had been stolen. He started tweeting: “This election is a total sham and a travesty.” “We are not a democracy!” “We should march on Washington and stop this travesty.” “Revolution!”
The 2012 election wasn’t a sham, Mr. Trump just made his charges up, as he did in 2020, when his supporters stormed the Capitol.
It’s what he does. He’ll likely do some variation next week.
... It is likely true that if the Democrats get a big, historic outcome Tuesday, they will misread their mandate and go off on various toots. They’ll think that change by definition must be extreme or won’t be noticed. A growing number will continue their grim plodding toward socialist revolution. ...
Thursday, October 29, 2026
Christine Lagarde to resign from ECB in February instead of October in order to be able to speak more freely to French politics
My bet is she will be a candidate against Marine Le Pen.
Christine Lagarde to Resign Early as ECB President
... Her commitment to finishing the job has been in question for more than a year, fueled in part by her own acknowledgments that she could quit early.
Speaking to reporters Thursday, Lagarde said there was never a good time to leave. But, she said, her decision was informed by a desire to speak more openly about world affairs. That includes developments taking place in France, her home country, according to people familiar with the matter.
“I want to have the freedom of speech, the freedom of expression and the freedom to engage on matters that are not monetary-policy matters,” she said. “I think that my voice can help. My action can help, in relation to principles that are dear to my heart.”
... Lagarde’s decision to step down early means Macron will also have the chance to help pick her successor before he leaves the Élysée next May. ...
Real GDP at 3.4% in the first estimate for 3Q2026 is good, but the trend since 2Q1983 is still not like the robust post-war
I'd rather have the economy trending to 5.4% than the one trending to 2.2%.
Trump Republicanism overpromised and has not delivered. It has been nothing more than an irritable mental gesture toward Reaganism.
Reagan Republicanism, as a form of liberalism, underestimated the power of evil in human nature. It sincerely but naively thought that everything would turn out just hunky dory if you let people decide what to do with their own money, and give them more of it.
Well, they miss-allocated it, just in a more respectable form than the corner beggar.
The post-war consensus had kept ordinary income tax rates high and arbitraged that against relatively lower long term capital gains tax rates which benefited the domestic investment which produced the jobs, marriages, durable goods purchases, and homes young people can only dream about today. In short, the GDP.
The high ordinary income tax rates went bye-bye, and the money went where it was willed in an orgy of individualism. The big money got miss-allocated in the dot-com bubble, and globalism arrived just in the nick of time to rescue it, fleeing abroad. As a result middle classes were built elsewhere while the middle class at home withered. It now had to work two jobs and have smaller, or no, families. And cultural commentators seriously wonder how identity came to be questioned to the point of gender.
We can quantify this social disaster in the form of $10.5 trillion of missing real GDP in 3Q2026 since 3Q1983.
We have today $24.611 trillion of real GDP, having grown at a compound annual rate of 2.733% for the 43 years since 1983.
At the 36-year post-war CAGR of 3.585%, however, real GDP would be $35.104 trillion instead, 42.6% better.
Nothing guarantees that growth would have continued at the old post-war rate had the Reagan Revolution never occurred, but that doesn't change the fact that he sold his program in the belief that America's best days were not behind her.
Arguing at this long remove that Reaganism hasn't really been tried reminds me of nothing so much as Keynesianism redivivus. And AOC thinks his first name is Milton.
Republicans today are oblivious to all of this, and the only Democrat who comes close to understanding it that I know of is Rahm Emanuel, but the Democrat Party of today openly hates the Joos.
We are, as the kids like to say, totally screwed.
Core pce inflation came in at 3.1% in Sep 2026 and same in 3Q2026
Trump II is not Trump I.
As bad as we may think this is, this is still nothing like the late 1980s or the late 1960s, not to mention the years intervening those.
CNBC trying to look on the bright side of inflation, paragraph 15 lol
Third-quarter U.S. GDP increases a better-than-expected 3.4% as September inflation accelerates
... There was some good inflation news for the period: On a quarterly basis, PCE prices rose 2.1% on the headline number and 2.5% for core, down respectively from 5% and 3.3% in Q2. ...
2.5% in this particular measure looks pretty good in comparison with the current headline measures, but only until you locate just where we are with it relative to where we have been.
This measure of inflation had stayed pretty much licked from 3Q1997 until 2021, averaging 1.5% or less for a decade of years, but like Clouseau's priceless Steinway, not any more.
Wednesday, October 28, 2026
5Y-30Y not buying today's Fed pause
But Kevin Warsh was damned if he hiked, and damned if he didn't, because of the election next week.
Slate epitomizes what's wrong with the left
Slate epitomizes what's wrong with the left for its routine attempts to deny reality, even in something as hypocritically trifling as this.
... Ethan Klein is one of those dreaded content creators you keep hearing about without ever really knowing what Content he Creates. His show, H3 Podcast, has 2.5 million subscribers on YouTube and 56 million likes on TikTok. ... [Hila] is now a public cuckold and the future of her business remains uncertain. ...
Which is where I stopped reading.
You can't be the most hated with millions of subscribers and likers, and in English only the man can be the cuckold, which is sexist to the left, hence the deliberate misuse of the term.
Let's just call this what it is: An excuse to vent the anti-semitism which is in the left's DNA.
There are no standards to the left, except those adhered to and violated by the right.
We don’t have to judge ... Consensual nonmonogamy is now officially mainstream.
Exactement.
Tuesday, October 27, 2026
Suez Canal Transits 3Q2026 vs 3Q2023: Houthi Red Sea menace drives tanker traffic south to north through Suez down 26.6%, net tons down 25.3%, all vessels both directions down almost 38%, all tonnage down almost 50%
3Q2026
Number of vessels 4050 (down 37.9%)
Net Ton 203,762,000 (down 49.5%)
Vessels per day 44.0
Number of Tankers 1688 (down 19.0%: NtoS down 9.4%; StoN down 26.6%)
Net Ton 84,985,000 (down 17.6%: NtoS down 7.2%; StoN down 25.3%)
Tankers per day 18.3 (NtoS 9.1; StoN 9.3)
3Q2023
Number of vessels 6523
Net Ton 403,144,000
Vessels per day 70.9
Number of Tankers 2083
Net Ton 103,076,000
Tankers per day 22.6 (NtoS 10.0; StoN 12.6)
Monday, October 26, 2026
Old John Anderson is still in the news feed this Monday
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/oct/26/john-anderson-obituary?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
John Anderson, who has died aged 71, reinvigorated country music in the 1980s by returning the genre to its unvarnished roots.
... His adoption of what became known as “New Traditionalism” was so successful that he scored 40 hits on the Billboard country charts in the US, five of which made No 1 – and his work inspired a new generation of singers in Nashville, including George Strait, Randy Travis and Dwight Yoakam, all of whom followed his credo and went on to enjoy great success.
... His 1981 album, John Anderson 2, featured two Top 10 hits and inspired a number of commentators to compare him to Lefty Frizzell and George Jones, two of country’s finest male vocalists.
... His 1987 MCA album, Blue Skies Again, demonstrated what an expressive ballad singer he was ...
Yes, but the decision will be made by the voters
Trump says he’ll soon decide whether to ‘make a deal’ with Iran or ‘finish it off’
... "It’s getting to be decision time," Trump said in a Fox News interview on Sunday. ...
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