News and Sentiment

A snapshot as of July:

Figure 1: U. Michigan Consumer Sentiment (FRED series UMCSENT) (blue), Conference Board Confidence (tan), SF Fed News Sentiment index (green), all standardized. July sentiment is preliminary; July news sentiment through July 21. NBER defined peak-to-trough recession dates shaded gray. U.Michigan via FRED, Conference Board, SF Fed, NBER and author’s calculations.

Using a regression of UMCSENT on news sentiment over the above sample period (Adj. R2 = 0.41), the (preliminary) July observation on the is 7 points below actual, just about 2 standard errors away from predicted.

 

9 thoughts on “News and Sentiment”

  1. pgl

    Mona Charen was Ronald Reagan’s speechwriter but she hates this MAGA crowd:
    America Has One Healthy Political Party
    Democrats just passed a test that Republicans have failed repeatedly since 2015.
    https://www.thebulwark.com/p/america-one-healthy-political-party-biden-trump

    WITHIN MINUTES OF PRESIDENT BIDEN’S WITHDRAWAL from the 2024 race, Senator Tom Cotton leaped onto X to declare that “Joe Biden succumbed to a coup by Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and Hollywood donors, ignoring millions of Democratic primary votes. Donald Trump took a bullet for democracy.”

    Radio host Erick Erickson was even more creative, tweeting that “Y’all can argue over the word coup, but Biden stepping aside is the American equivalent of all those people accidentally falling out of windows in Russia.”

    David Sacks, the Putin lickspittle, Elon Musk appendage, and featured speaker at the Republican National Convention, offered that “One candidate survived assassination. The other staged a coup. Your choice, America.”

    And Speaker Mike Johnson told a TV audience on Sunday that “it would be wrong and I think unlawful in accordance to some of these state rules for a handful of people to go in the backroom and switch it out because they’re—they don’t like the candidate any longer.”

    This is rich. There is indeed a candidate in this race who attempted to stage a coup, and we know who that is. Trump submitted his false electoral votes, pressured his vice president, and sent his goons to Capitol Hill because he would not accept the verdict of the voters. And the party that openly admires Vladimir Putin (see Carlson, Tucker) has no business making snarky comments about people falling out of windows. So please sit down and shut up with your coup talk.

    The response of the GOP to a real attempted coup? After some initial condemnations, nearly the entire party fell into line denying that January 6th had been anything to get excited about and endorsing the coup-plotter for re-election. There were no calls for him to drop out of the race.

    As for the speaker’s suggestion that it’s somehow illegal for the candidate to decline to run, perhaps he might want to consult the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids involuntary servitude.

    What we witnessed over the past several weeks was a political party, the Democratic party, acting like a healthy institution and not like a mob-inflected cult. Democrats ushered Joe Biden into the nomination in 2020, and they ushered him out in 2024 for good and sufficient reasons. Yes, it was painful for Biden, but with the stakes being so high, Democrats found that sentimentality was something neither they nor the country could afford.

    In the early months of 2020, as Donald Trump’s presidency was entering its most reckless and clownish year in response to a deadly pandemic, the Democratic primaries were serving up a worrying alternative. Bernie Sanders won Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada. A self-proclaimed socialist who had honeymooned in the USSR, Sanders was popular with a dedicated share of primary voters, but widely perceived to be a general election loser. Yet the dynamics of nominating races being cumulative, he seemed to be rolling down the tracks toward victory. Only South Carolina stood as a speed bump between the first three contests and the Super Tuesday races that would decide the contest.

    AND SO THE PARTY MOVED. Parties are more than primary voters. They are elected leaders and candidates and donors and influencers. They are community leaders and church voices and former presidents. In 2020, many of those figures took a hard look at the Sanders candidacy and recognized that if the party failed to take collective action—if half a dozen competitors remained in the race (as Republicans had done in the face of the Trump threat in 2016)—then the party would nominate a sure loser.

    At that stage, Joe Biden had come in fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire. He finished second in Nevada, but with less than half the share of votes that Sanders received. Still, the Democrats proved themselves a mighty machine. First Rep. Jim Clyburn, with enormous influence among Black South Carolinians, threw his support behind Biden, and in short order, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and Beto O’Rourke dropped out of the race, also endorsing Biden. Those candidates represented the Democratic center, and when they were no longer dividing it up, it coalesced around Biden. He didn’t so much win in 2020 as he was carried on the shoulders of a party that made a wise calculation about its main chance.

    That’s not to discount the whole campaign. Biden did a good job in the general election campaign (though COVID made it an unprecedentedly undemanding race), performed well enough in the debates and town halls, and delivered a great convention speech.

    In 2024, the party that hoisted Biden to the nomination had the dreary task of persuading him to hang it up. He was stubborn and it required a full court press but the former speaker and former presidents and donors and elected officials and editorial writers and more did the sad duty that the moment required. It was not a walk in the park for anyone, as gratitude and affection had to give way to the harsh political calculus. But that’s what grown-ups have to do. They have to look reality in the face and do what’s necessary.

    The Democratic party demonstrated for the second straight election cycle that it remains a healthy organ of democracy. And it’s a damn lucky thing it is, because it is arrayed against a party that celebrates violence, marinates in lies, and worships an insurrectionist.

    1. Ivan

      As Krugman pointed out in his latest column, the facts are simply ignored and don’t count much anymore. The GOP congress literally spewed out one lie and gross distortion after another. Not even the slightest attempt to cover with some kind of deniability. Pure red meat thrown to the MAGA cult dogs, and they ate it.

      Crime and inflation out of control, black people have falling wages or can’t find jobs (because of immigrants), the border crossing numbers are horrible and getting worse, the economy is sinking and jobs being exported. These are all factual lies that are easy to disprove by looking at public data. But that doesn’t matter because the MAGA dogs don’t do their own research – they just swallow raw, whatever right wing personalities say. Present data to the contrary and they will dismiss it as “fake” or “deep state” (even as the exact same sources are used to prove their narratives if there is agreement).

  3. pgl

    DJT Stock Falls. Why Kamala Harris Is a Worry for Trump Media.
    https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/djt-stock-falls-why-kamala-harris-is-a-worry-for-trump-media/ar-BB1qtz3w?ocid=BingNewsSerp

    Trump Media and Technology stock fell on Tuesday, with Vice President Kamala Harris on course to win the Democratic nomination for November’s election. The stock, which is majority owned by Republican candidate Donald Trump and trades under the ticker DJT, was down 3.9%% to $33.34. Trump Media’s stock price has tended to indicate how investors feel about the former president’s reelection chances, rather than fundamentals such as the company’s earnings or future cash flows. The Truth Social parent is a bit-part player in the social-media market, which is dominated by Big Tech companies including Meta Platforms and Elon Musk’s X. Harris said on Monday that she had received the support of enough delegates to become her party’s official candidate, and was “look[ing] forward to formally accepting the nomination soon.” Trump’s odds of winning the election have edged down to 57% from 64% since current President Joe Biden pulled out of the race on Sunday, according to the New Zealand-based political futures market PredictIt, although its gauge is thinly traded and a reflection of its audience’s views.

    DJT shares are now trading for around $32.50. Poor little Ricky Stryker is losing his shirt which is sad as his former occupation (porn star) has decided little Ricky is no longer man enough for gainful employment.

  4. Macroduck

    Vaguely related to both news and sentiment:

    Kamala Harris, like Hillary and Bernie and any number of other national figures, has a core of committed supporters. An interesting behavior of the Harris crowd is that they swarm on social media. Racist or sexist attacks often result in dozens or hundreds of responses, aimed at castrating the initial attack.

    This creates an interesting challenge to Republican goons. They haven’t yet discovered how to “swift boat” Harris, but they’re working on it. Kelly-Anne’s dog-whistle racism is an experiment to see if racism will stick. Same with questions about her citizenship. Same with “Jezebel”.

    Will the Harris social media swarm prevent the creation of some central ugly story about Harris? Seems unlikely. The press is waiting like baby birds, beaks stretched wide, to be fed some easy story about how Harris is “perceived”. When George Stephanopolis asks “are you too old?”, the goons have done their job, knowing pundits will do the rest. It’s a major part of horse-race political coverage. Journalists can then congratulate themselves for demonstrating “balance”.

    The best we can probably hope is that the swarm will convince part of the voting public not to believe the racism, sexism, elitism…whatever made-up nonsense the press decides is “the story” about Harris. Some “swift boat” efforts may also backfire – misogyny really doesn’t go down very well any more.

    Oh, and let’s start a pool on how Doug comes under atrack. Dibs on “Jewish”.

  6. pgl

    CNN’s John Berman Calls Out Sen. Tom Cotton’s Definition Of A Coup
    https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/cnn-s-john-berman-calls-out-sen-tom-cotton-s-definition-of-a-coup/ar-BB1qv1wY?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=d5e304f4da164c38b13e42a73c31e81d&ei=12

    Sen. Tom Cotton is proof an Ivy League degree doesn’t guarantee an understanding of basic word definitions. In fact, the Arkansas Republican showed during a Tuesday interview on CNN that he has no idea what the word “coup” means. Here’s the back story: Ever since Joe Biden stepped down as a presidential candidate on Sunday, the Republicans who previously demanded he step down got mad that he stepped down, and claimed it was a “coup.” It’s not. A coup is typically defined as “the violent overthrow or alteration of an existing government by a small group,” and not “delegates of a political party choose to support a new candidate weeks before the party makes their official nomination.” But Cotton, who famously suggested deploying troops to attack peaceful protesters in 2020, apparently didn’t read that entry in Merriam-Webster based on his CNN appearance with John Berman. The anchor asked the senator why Republicans keep calling the Democratic Party’s decision to circle their wagons around Kamala Harris after Biden’s departure from the campaign a “coup,” but don’t use that term for something like, say, attacking the Capitol because you’re mad your candidate didn’t win the election. Berman was blunt: “So why call this a coup and not Jan. 6?”

    Cotton then offered the type of red meat that makes MAGA followers all warm and fuzzy, making sure to check off all the liberal boogey-people like “Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, George Clooney, Hollywood moguls, [and] Wall Street bankers,” who he insisted were working behind closed doors to get the president “to throw in the towel.”

    “And now you have the Democratic Party uniting around Kamala Harris, who not only has never won a Democratic primary, she’s never won a single vote for president, yet they’ve installed her as their nominee,” he said. ”That’s what they want to go forward with in this election, even as we still have questions.”

    Berman once again pressed Cotton on why he’s calling Democrats’ decision to support Harris weeks before a candidate is officially declared, but not an event where a bunch of people attacked the Capitol by force, a coup. “You use the language coup, and again, you’ve never said that for Jan. 6,” Berman said, while pointing out that when Democrats replaced Biden with Harris “no cops were beaten up [and] no one defecated in the Capitol.” He asked the senator and Harvard Law School graduate to confirm “there was no criminal trespass in terms of changing the Democratic candidates, were there?” Cotton, stuck between a crock and a hard place, had to concede Berman’s point.

    Good job ala Berman but could we please buy this Senator a decent dictionary?

Comments are closed.