Then instead of 135224 thousand private employment in April, it would be 135509 thousand.
Figure 1: Private nonfarm payroll employment from BLS (blue), and from ADP (tan), in logs 2023M03=0. Source: BLS, ADP via FRED, and author’s calculations.
I normalize to 2023M03, since data up to that point have been benchmark revised.
illegal border crossings are plummeting.
Preliminary data for June show they’re lower than they were same time of year in 2019, Trump’s last prepandemic year.
https://x.com/crampell/status/1808529092125315403
Of course Trump LIED about this issue Thursday night and of course the lame CNN hosts did not call Trump on this lie.
Even young people mangle up words, trump lies, American media sees nothing, It’s a pragmatic COWARDLY way that leads Germany to Hitler.
Congrats Atlantic Magazine’s Jeffrey Goldberg, YOU are Hitler’s Jüdische Ghetto-Polizei or Jüdischer Ordnungsdienst. Congrats PBS Washington Ass-Hats in Review!! Congrats!!!
I get the feeling that Menzie is making some point with this post, that is pretty obvious, that I am not “getting”. And I hate when I get that sense because it makes me feel like a damned idiot.
Good question. One persistent issue raised against the payroll job count is that it relies on the firm birth/death model for a large fraction of reported job gains. ADP isn’t vulnerable to this complaint because it actually counts jobs instead of relying on estimates from a model.
ADP also provides data on job growth by firm size. Let’s assume new firms tend to start out small. If that’s correct, then a high number of firm births would mean strong job growth among small firms. If that’s the case, then ADP’s data by firm size seems to validate the large number of new jobs from the birth/death model. Here’s a picture:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1pMZi
The picture doesn’t cover every firm-size category, ’cause I’m lazy. What it shows is that between February, 2020 and May 2024, firms with between 1 and 19 employees (small) added 2,371,000 employees, while firms with between 50 and 249 employees (medium-ish) added 1,861,000 jobs, and firms with over 500 employees (big) added only 1,669,000 jobs.
By actual count, small firms have added jobs faster than medium-sized or large firms. If new firms are mostly small, then it looks like the birth/death model is correct in adding lots of jobs.
Menzie’s picture suggests BLS is counting too few private jobs. Maybe the birth/death plug is adding too few jobs, rather than too many.
You damned son-of-a-gun. Why is your gray matter so much better than mine??? Curses on ye.
Practice, practice. I wanna do data analysis at Carnegie Hall.
: )
Kinky Friedman passed away. Very sad and will be missed. Take your cowboy hat off, bow your head down and take a moment.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/27/arts/music/kinky-friedman-dead.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2024/06/27/kinky-friedman-dead/
Sorry I was 4-5 days late to know.
WOW, another icon, (in my view), Robert Towne has passed away. They’re dropping like flies:
https://apnews.com/article/robert-town-dead-chinatown-ac725161fb4f49989f80ba69922aaa7c
https://www.npr.org/2024/07/02/nx-s1-5026994/robert-towne-dead-chinatown-screenwriter-obituary
Who’s next?? I don’t wanna know.
You know about Bill Walton, right?
Honestly, I had mixed feelings about Bill Walton, But I LOVEd his coach at Portland, Jack Ramsay. He was a great passer. My father always loved Bill Wooden. Here’s the deal, I always hated BIll Walton’s “TV personality”. that’s the part that got under my skin and bothered me. But actually now, I think he was a good person. Just PLEASE, don’t be a fake on TV.
My father loved John Wooden, apologies, wow, drinks taking over here.
Utterly and completely off topic – a horror story for music lovers:
The owner of Black Dog Sound Studios, Rick Beato, has released a YT video entitled “The Real Reason Why Music is Getting Worse”. I won’t link to it. The heart of the th problem is technology, but Beato isn’t making a simple Luddite complaint. He contends that technology has driven talent out of the studio. A drum track is cheaper than a drummer, so corporate decision-makers like drum tracks. A drum track cannot think up a new riff, so sameness sets in. Pick another instrument, rinse and repeat. Bach would never have had a job. Prince would have thrown a fit.
Many of you will know parts of the problem. Some may know all. What occurs to me is that this is another attempt to “cure” Baumol’s cost disease:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1816292
Art is apparently a co-morbidity, to be cured right along with cost.
I like Rick Beato also. Has he ever talked about the band Mastodon?? I like Beato and how he “analyses” music. I remember he talked about/to Steve Vai. Steve Vai affected me very much. When I was alone in my teacher’s dorm (just a cheap apartment) in China, I was deeply affected by Steve Vai and Santana, listening when drunk on fridays, also Bob Dylan, I like 2-3 songs by each and would listen to them over and over and over again. Often frustrated my teaching hadn’t met my own expectations, or sad my GF was all away on the other side of Dalian, Liaoning. Asking God why he put my GF on the other side of a large city of Dalian. MAcroduck, it really really really made me crazy, I often wondered if we had had those moments STOLEN from living a long distance on opposite sides of the city, If I could have explained to her how we could have had a very long relationship, contrary to what her parents must have pounded and hammered her with, in their conversations and her mind. It still kills me to this day when I think about it Macroduck. That’s why alcohol is very underrated MD. Alcohol will save you from very dark things, or “self hurt” shall we say.
I saw that video yesterday, it made total sense to me and I believe he’s hit it. The two John Bonham drum tracks were really telling. There’s also a guy (Wings of Pegasus) who talks about autotune and pitch correction technology in depth. He shows tracks of Karen Carpenter singing, you can see how almost perfect she was – and how “perfect” doesn’t sound as good, but it’s what’s produced today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWB96ZLWUUw . It’s very interesting stuff.
Karen Carpenter was also an underrated</b< drummer. Clive Davis (a super perceiver of talent) saw Karen's talent at drums. Just an exceedingly exceedingly talented woman, and If this creepy uncle is allowed to say here, a very sexy woman. Just monstrous talent (aside from her gorgeous looks). How someone who is so special and easy to be loved can injure herself or dislike herself in ANY way is so hard to understand. We need to show people they are loved, then maybe they won’t do what she did/ Left us so early
Oddly enough, not so underrated at the time. The annual Rolling Stone “ratings” of performers one year had her as the #4 drummer, ahead of, among many others, John Bonham, which did not please him one bit. But then she was pushed to the front, and people forgot, or just assumed that as a beautiful female singer with a great voice she couldn’t have been that good a drummer, or whatever…
I’m just at the edges of “getting old” now, Getting things confused in my mind, I said Clive Davis. and as I’m drinking and drinking and drinking here (I said my mind IMPROVES the more I drink_ I think I got Clive Davis Mixed up with Herb Alpert~~~who~~ actually did some record producing in addition to his musicianship. So I think I was thinking of Herb Alpert who foresaw and noticed Karen Carpenter’s , not only spectacular voice but she was a way better than average percussionist.
Thank goodness climate change will help plants grow. Otherwise, I’d be worried:
China’s grain harvest is looking grim. Rain where they don’t need it, none where they do:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-02/china-s-weather-extremes-threaten-crops-with-flooding-and-heat
Russia’s Rostov region looks set for a drop in farm production of as much as 30% this year due to drought:
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russias-southern-rostov-region-declares-emergency-due-drought-2024-06-11/
In Argentina, where Milei has called climate change a “socialist lie”, a warming climate has allowed yellow leaf hoppers to take up residence, cutting the corn harvest by nearly 10 million tons:
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/climate-shifts-leafhopper-bug-plagues-argentinas-corn-fields-2024-05-07/
Enough with country-by-country – here’s the whole ugly show:
https://waterpeacesecurity.org/info/global-tool-update-june-2024#:~:text=morocco%3A%20severe%20drought%20continues,to%20the%20country's%20agriculture%20ministry.
Europe in drought. England flooded. Morocco in drought. Brazil, flood and fire. Central America in drought. Africa and Asia and just about everybody suffering record high temperatures.
One bright spot – India has a 6-dayhead start on monsoons, which helps the harvest outlook if floods don’t undo the good done by early rains:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-02/monsoon-comes-early-and-covers-all-of-india-in-boost-for-crops?embedded-checkout=true
*isn’t bad, isn’t bad, I’m sorry
If the NYT is correct, Biden has given himself a few days to set things right:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/03/us/politics/biden-withdraw-election-debate.html
Team Trump is going after Harris hard, which tells me they are terrified she will lead the ticket. Of course their attacks run along these lines:
(1) She served the President ably; (2) She’s a WOMAN; and (3) She’s BLACK.
Sort of how they treated Hillary and Barack.
Paul Krugman Says Trump Tariffs Will Hurt 80% Of Americans, Benefit Only The Top 1%: ‘Burden Would Fall On…Working Class And The Poor’
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/paul-krugman-says-trump-tariffs-will-hurt-80-of-americans-benefit-only-the-top-1-burden-would-fall-on-working-class-and-the-poor/ar-BB1po9Ii?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=0c76c65215d44ff4aa62a8d7072b2bc6&ei=18
Of course that’s the goal of all Republican tax policy.
It is worth noting that the case of tariffs targeting one country (China), is the best case scenario for getting producers to swallow the cost of the tariff (by lowering prices). Producers from outside of China would presumably get a competitive edge (of say 10%) making a strong case for Chinese producers cutting prices – at least temporarily while they moved their own production to another country.
If you make a permanent tariff on all products from the whole world, there will be no incentive for producers to help importers swallowing part of the cost increase. In many cases it would basically be almost all of their profits.
If its US adding 10% on every other country in the world and all the world retaliating with a similar 10% tariff on US products, it would make more sense for the foreign producers to move any sales lost in the US into the rest of the world (where they now have a 10% advantage over US produced products).
The ten-year Treasury yield closed at 4.29% on June 27, before that evening’s presidential debate. On July 1, it closed at 4.48%. “King of Debt” Trump’s improved chances of winning the presidency apparently trouble bond holders.
Not the biggest yield increase ever seen, but pretty obvious on the right-hand side of the chart:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1pNoR
Not that he’s the only one, but Ben Gurion University history prof Benny Morris thinks Israel should nuke Iran:
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-historian-benny-morris-calls-nuclear-strike-iran
It’s probably worth noting that Morris has been urging a nuclear strike on Iran for at least the past 16 years:
https://archive.ph/CPIQ5
Let’s remember that Iran really got busy with it’s nuclear program after being named a member of Bush’s axis of evil. Axis member Iraq didn’t have nukes and the U.S. invaded Iraq. Axis member North Korea had nukes and didn’t get invaded. Nukes keep you safe. Israel knows that nukes keep you safe; that’s why Israel has them.
Netanyahu howled against the deal Obama (and China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and Germany) made to forestall Iran’s development of nuclear weapons. Trump joined Netanyahu because Obama, right? and the result is renewed agitation to nuke a country of 90 million people.
Netanyahu undermined the Palestinian Authority and any hope for a Palestinian homeland and ended up with a more potent Hamas. Netanyahu undermined the Iran nuke deal and now faces the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iraq. Everything he touches turns into a new excuse for death and misery. Speaking of which, he has just taken another chunk of the West Bank away from it’s Palestinian owners.
What he seems unable to grasp is that the retaliation would likely be a rain of dirty bombs that would make all of Israel uninhabitable for the next 50,000 years.
Moses, you know how we’ve discussed China’s behavior toward Russia? Not so much joined-at-the-hip as whatever is good for China? Here’s a look at Russia/China international relations not focused on Ukraine:
https://archive.ph/50qgD
Sphere of influence stuff.
Thanks for this.
OK, I’m overdoing it. Last one, I promise…until the next one.
Jefferson on the question of a high officer og government breaking the law in pursuit of his duties:
“The question you propose, Whether circumstances do not sometimes occur which make it a duty in officers of high trust to assume authorities beyond the law, is easy of solution in principle, but sometimes embarrasing in practice. a strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen: but it is not the highest. the laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. to lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law, would be to lose the law itself…”
“The officer who is called to act on this superior ground, does indeed risk himself on the justice of the controlling powers of the Constitution, and his station makes it his duty to incur the risk.”
“It is incumbent on those only who accept of great charges, to risk themselves on great occasions, when the safety of the nation, or some of its very high interests are at stake.”
“[T]he good officer is bound to draw it at his own peril, and throw himself on the justice of his country and the rectitude of his motives.”
So, the president has a duty to act in the interest of the nation. In extreme cases, that duty extends to breaking the law (in the interest of the nation, not his own). When the interest of the nation requires that he break the law, he does so at the risk of prosecution, and must rely on “the justice of the country”.
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-03-02-0060
That’s the view of an original Founding Father. It is not the view of the partisan, “originalist” majority of the Supreme Court.
Josh Marshall pointed this out.
When Justice Sotomayer read her dissent, she added to “I dissent” by declaring “I and the Founding Fathers dissent”.
I hear this made the Chief Justice angry. Too bad – the Chief Justice wrote this abomination of a majority opinion.
I’d have liked to see “The President has not needed immunity for over 230 years. Perhaps he needs it now to deal with anti-democratic elements on the Supreme Court and in Congress.”
Not possible, of course, but still…
Clarence Thomas stuck in big toes in this water by claiming over this period we have had lots of Presidents do things some would consider crimes but did not get prosecuted. Of course he failed to mention ANY examples. So let me suggest two:
(1) Nixon and Watergate. Which is why Ford had to pardon this criminal.
(2) And yea – Bill Clinton did get a blow job from Monica which Lindsey Graham considers a crime. Of course Trump raping women is now considered an official act of the office.
Truth often has the ingredients to make people angry, Often just “a faint whiff” of truth, nevermind a large spoon of truth,
Sotomayer and those of us who lived “lower middle class” in our childhood have sensitive sniffers of “BS”
I have always said Ruth Bader Ginsberg was the best Justice on this court in our entire history. Sotomayer may be the new Ginsberg.
I should say also. the Carpenters are one of the more popular western artists in CHina. Chinese people generally love the Carpenters, and for good reason. One of the few western acts not pointed (by the Chinese communist party) to for the sole reason to exhibit the worst parts of western culture, Mainland Chinese genuinely like the songs.