ADP surprised on the upside (143K vs 124K consensus):
Not sure what this means, but ADP is outstripping the official series, which is itself above the preliminary benchmark.
Figure 1: Private nonfarm payroll employment from CES (blue), preliminary benchmark (light blue), ADP-Stanford (green), QCEW (red), change from 2023M01, in 000’s, s.a. QCEW seasonally adjusted using X-13 in logs. Source: BLS, ADP via FRED, and author’s calculations.
Figure 2: Private nonfarm payroll employment from CES (blue), preliminary benchmark (light blue), ADP-Stanford (green), QCEW (red), change from 2023M01, in logs. QCEW seasonally adjusted using X-13 in logs. Source: BLS, ADP via FRED, and author’s calculations.
Bruce Hall has found someone dumber than EJ Antoni when it comes to economics. Peter St. Onge – bartender who pretends to be an economist after he gets really drunk!
Unreliable Job Data from Biden-Harris Clouds Economic Picture
https://www.heritage.org/budget-and-spending/commentary/unreliable-job-data-biden-harris-clouds-economic-picture
This dumb rant starts off by telling us that inflation is still out of control. Yea right. And then:
“The latest data show job openings, a proxy for labor demand, crashed by half a million in a single month, falling to the lowest level since January 2021 and down 4.5 million in little more than two years.”
Well – job openings are still over 8 million:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSJOL/#:~:text=Total%20Nonfarm%20Job%20Openings%20are%20measured
I was starting toi think Antoni had captured the title of dumbest man alive. But no – Bruce Hall still leads this competition!
Heritage Foundation: Our mission is to make the world a dumber place.
If you want people to believe things that aren’t true, you have to work at it. You have to supply “alternative explanations” to go along with “alternative facts”. Then, you give people an emotionally appealing reason to choose the lie over the truth. St. Onge, Antoni, Cass, Vance, Drudge, Kudlow – the all juice their “alternative” stories with outrage, with conspiracy theories, scorn, victimization. A Big Lie must be repeated endlessly, and these guys know it.
Here’s what Walter Langer, in his profile of Hitler for the OSS, said of the Big Lie:
“[Hitler’s] primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20200801092323/https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP78-02646R000600240001-5.pdf
Sound familiar?
So Brucie’s new economic guru Peter St. Onge actually does more than stupid Youtubes!
Are We Already in Recession?
https://www.profstonge.com/p/have-we-been-in-recession-for-years
Inflation: the Key to Recession
To give a flavor, the official inflation rate since Covid has been around 21%. But fast food menu prices — a go-to indicator for Foreign exchange investors — are up between 35% and 50%. People posting grocery receipts online say it’s actually more than 50%. The problem is if inflation was actually, say, 35% it means GDP hasn’t gone up at all since pre-Covid. It means it actually went down. Implying we’ve been in recession for nearly 5 years.
Gee – Peter has captured most of the stupid things Brucie baby has written. Let’s see. A price increase of 35% means real income has declined by 35%? Does this MORON not get that nominal GDP has risen by more than the price level. Also note those rising real GDP figures has already taken into account the difference between the increase in nominal GDP (which Peter ignores) as well as any alleged increase in the price level.
But also note that this lying clown takes the alleged price increase over a 5 year period as the annual inflation rate. I bet that made Brucie boy all excited but it is STOOPID. Of course BLS notes that the increase in CPI over this period is nowhere close to 35%.
I get bartenders sometimes drink on the job but this clown must have been drunk the entire period under discussion. Bruce Hall’s ideal economist!
If the ADP figure for September matches the BLS private hiring figure (it won’t) and the average for government hiring for the past 3 month of 20,000 holds for September (probably not), then the establishment survey gain for September will be 163,000. The 3- month average as of August was 116,000.
The things I missed when I skipped the VP debate!
JD Vance is wrong about climate science, experts say. It isn’t “weird,” it’s overwhelmingly accurate
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/jd-vance-is-wrong-about-climate-science-experts-say-it-isn-t-weird-it-s-overwhelmingly-accurate/ar-AA1rEQTt?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=ffdb7cd4b5ee43b09ec0c1f73fc82856&ei=12
During Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate between Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) and Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.), Vance dismissed climate change as “weird science,” skeptically characterizing the scientific consensus about burning fossil fuels as “this idea that carbon emissions drive all the climate change.” Top climate scientists were unimpressed with Vance’s posturing. These included University of Pennsylvania climatologist Dr. Michael E. Mann, who wrote to Salon that he could not “stomach Vance’s constant lies and the lack of fact-checking,” from CBS debate hosts, adding that “the reality is that the world’s scientists say that carbon emissions cause climate change. Trump has dismissed climate change as a hoax. Denial of the threat to our civilization posed by climate change, alone, is disqualifying for the Trump-Vance ticket.” Expand article logo
“What he said was just completely wrong, but not a surprise,” Glenn “The Hurricane” Schwartz, said. He was a meteorologist for NBC’s Philadelphia affiliate until the 1980s and, analogous to the fictional tornado chasers in “Twisters,” Schwartz chased hurricanes and other extreme storms in real life. Schwartz added that there are three facts about climate change which cannot be denied: “Number one, carbon dioxide is increasing, which increases the temperatures of the earth. Number two, it’s us doing the increase. Number three, things will keep getting worse unless we start producing those three things.
Yea – JD is dumber than a retarded rock. But hiring Bruce Hall as his advisor on this issue? Now that is STOOOPID.
Yep. I can only repeat what I wrote above. What Vance is doing is how the Big Lie works.
https://ml-eu.globenewswire.com/Resource/Download/51b09aae-ecd3-4553-bbc9-e400896c6efe
A.P. Møller-Mærsk A/S
I’m providing a link to the 2023 Annual Report for this foreign based shipping company. The White House is trying to get such companies to increase wages noting that companies like these have been highly profitable.
Five-year summary on page 10 is on point. Profit margins in 2021 and 2022 were indeed very high. Not so much in 2023, 2020, or 2019. Maybe there is some analysis of shipping profits over a longer period of time but I have not found one.
Trump Refused to Approve Wildfire Aid Until He Learned Affected Areas Were MAGA: Report
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-refused-to-approve-wildfire-aid-until-he-learned-affected-areas-were-maga-report/ar-AA1rEZ8d?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=7304434faa65448385dc39038fceeb7b&ei=9
As the death toll from Hurricane Helene surpasses 200 people and the Southeast continues to reel from the disaster, Donald Trump is working overtime to politicize the tragedy into an attack against his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. Despite governors from both political parties lauding of the Biden administration’s response, Trump is insisting the federal government has abandoned affected communities. Earlier this week, Trump baselessly claimed that “the Federal Government, and the Democrat Governor of [North Carolina are] going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas,” ahead of a visit to a disaster zone in Valdosta, Georgia. But for all of the former president’s posturing as a capable leader who would better handle the crisis, his record in the White House says otherwise.
According to a Thursday report from E&E News, in 2018 – as wildfires ravaged large swaths of California – Trump initially refused to approve aid to the state because he felt some of the affected regions didn’t like him enough. Mark Harvey, then Trump’s Senior Director for Resilience Policy on the National Security Council Staff, told E&E News, a subset of Politico, that the former president only approved the aid after being shown data proving that the affected counties contained a sufficient amount of his supporters. “We went as far as looking up how many votes he got in those impacted areas … to show him these are people who voted for you,” Harvey recalled. His account was backed up by former Trump White House Homeland Security Adviser Olivia Troy.
It’s not the only time Trump based his response to a national disaster on the politics of those caught in its wake. A 2021 report found that the Trump administration blocked nearly $20 billion in hurricane relief to Puerto Rico in the aftermath of 2017’s Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico. Trump publicly bashed San Juan’s mayor at the time – Carmen Yulín Cruz, who had been critical of Trump – as “incompetent,” and downplayed the severity of the storm that killed nearly 3,000 people. Last year, Florida Governor Ron Desantis in his memoir described speaking to Trump in 2019 after Hurricane Michael swept through northern Florida. DeSantis requested that Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) foot the entire bill for recovery efforts instead of the standard 75%. “This is Trump country – and they need your help,” DeSantis pitched Trump. “They love me in the Panhandle,” the former president said. “I must have won 90 percent of the vote out there. Huge crowds. What do they need?” Shortly after the conversation took place, Trump signed an executive order commanding the federal government to cover “100 percent of the total eligible costs” related to the hurricane response.
Melania Trump on abortion rights:
“It is imperative to guarantee that women have autonomy in deciding their preference of having children, based on their own convictions, free from any intervention or pressure from the government.”
https://thehill.com/newsletters/campaign-report/4914614-melania-trump-makes-abortion-rights-push/
“The news shocked political pundits and anti-abortion activists alike.”
That’s because pundits and activists have their heads stuck up their own backsides. Trump has been shying away from his success in ending abortion rights for millions of women, because the political cost of that success is so high.
In Trump world, gaining power and wealth are the only imperatives. There are no strongly- held princies. Anybody who doesn’t see that is staring at their own insides instead of the real world.