Vital Statistics:
| Last | Change | |
| S&P futures | 2989 | 8.25 |
| Oil (WTI) | 55.35 | -1.24 |
| 10 year government bond yield | 1.70% | |
| 30 year fixed rate mortgage | 3.95% |
Stocks are up this morning on no real news. Bonds and MBS are down.
Personal incomes rose 0.4% in August, while personal consumption rose 0.1%. Income surprised to the upside, while spending disappointed. Inflation remains within the Fed’s target, with the core PCE index rising 0.1% MOM and 1.8% YOY. The headline PCE, which includes food and energy, was flat MOM and up 1.4% YOY. Wages and salaries were up 0.6% MOM and up 4.8% YOY. Given that inflation is running below 2%, we are seeing real wage growth.
Durable goods orders rose as well, increasing 0.2%, while the Street was looking for a decrease of 1%. Ex-transportation they were up 0.5%, again above expectations. Business capital expenditures disappointed, however falling 0.2%.
Pending home sales rose 1.6% in August, according to NAR. “It is very encouraging that buyers are responding to exceptionally low interest rates,” said Lawrence Yun, NAR chief economist. “The notable sales slump in the West region over recent years appears to be over. Rising demand will reaccelerate home price appreciation in the absence of more supply.” The Western region was up 8% YOY as falling mortgage rates are improving affordability.
Millennials are continuing to leave the big cities, as they head to the suburbs to raise families (and also get priced out). New York City lost almost 38,000 young adults last year, which was twice the decline it had seen in the previous few years. When the Millennials were younger, urban walkable environments were all the rage and many in the industry thought this time was different. It wasn’t. The Millennial generation is getting married later and having kids later, but it seems like they are going for the same thing every generation prior to them wanted: space, good schools, etc. This is good news for the builders at the lower price points. Take a look at PulteGroup’s chart below.
The IPO market is still broken. Peloton was the most recent IPO to break price on the open. “Break Price” means to trade below the IPO price. It opened around $27 versus an IPO price of $29. This won’t help We Work’s IPO which is looking like an absolute dumpster fire as the price keeps getting cut. Historically, IPOs would trade at substantial premiums to their offering price, but those days are over. This represents the change in who pays the bills for investment banks, from the buy side to issuers.
Filed under: Economy, Morning Report |
All Things in Moderation 
Gasp!
How dare he!
Impeach!!
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How dare he defend himself against CIA moles out to take him down.
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I know, right? Outrageous!
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It’s hard to think of a phrase that has less credibility with me these days in a news article, than “Experts say” without citing who the actual supposed experts are.
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well they are experts in feeding the narrative the left wants to hear.
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“Experts say” is meaningless. It’s an effort to add credibility where there is no credibility. A specific person with a particular pedigree and background can say something that happens within their field, and if that’s what’s actually happening, that’s how the information should be imparted.
But the person should also be identified, as that would allow other people to judge their biases. Without that identification, what they say is no more relevant or useful than anything anybody else has to say.
“Experts say” is often used when talking about big, complicated issues with a lot of unknowns where “expertise” makes them no more likely to be accurate than a blind guess. You may be a meteorological expert but you can’t tell me if it’s going to rain at 5 PM on Tuesday next week. Because no matter how expert you are, you just can’t know. And that’s in a field that is based on improving accuracy.
And these “experts” are often doing nothing more than giving their opinion, and their “expertise” makes their opinions no better than anybody else’s.
… And the example above begs a lot of questions. There would need to be a lot more explaining as to how the president of the country using a system to keep secure records of his conversations “poses national security risks”.
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Trump started using tools available to him to work towards accomplishing legitimate management goals. Other presidents hadn’t used these tools in these ways, so he should be impeached.
There’s a little of the “all previous presidents used tissue from the long rectangular box. Trump has demanded the little square boxes. And this tissues with lotion in them! If this doesn’t rise to the level of an impeachable offense, I do not know what does!!!”
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“Experts say the use of tissue with embedded lotion poses grave security risks for our nation.”
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Counter Narrative! Counter Narrative!
I feel sorry for this dumb bastard. Knowing the NYT his days are numbered. The readers will want his scalp.
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Speaking actual truth to actual power always carries risks.
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Guys, Trump has even ruined Impeachment!
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/09/27/trump-impeachment-analysis-228580
Does this headline sound confident?
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sniff…People don’t take our hysteria seriously… come on guys…
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Big font, double-decker headlines, homepage takeovers: It’s been a big week in the news business for visual devices like these.
Not here. And how many people have actually seen a newspaper headline this week, in a given week? I saw two of the thin newsletters that pass for a local paper here this week, and haven’t really seen that.
This guy is living in the pass. Memphis and what point supported to major papers and several smaller, independent papers. Now we can’t support one paper. They are dinosaurs, and in more ways that one.
You have newspapers because it was a way to aggregate news for the community. They no longer serve a purpose. But like television news eventually killed off the number-two papers in a lot of towns (there is certainly a correlation between the end of the Press Scimitar here the number of households with one and more-than-one television–and cable news killed it completely) the internet and all it has wrought in terms of online news, podcasts, information sharing, news aggregation, etc–it’s killed the printed paper. Nobody cares about double-decker headlines and homepage takeovers. That is an artifact of an era when newspaper journalists used to be relevant.
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It took a little more than a year from that night until February 1999, when Clinton survived his impeachment by the House with a mostly party-line vote acquittal at a Senate trial. In retrospect, it seems clear what a critical moment of transition the Clinton impeachment — for that matter, the entire Clinton presidency — was in the journey to Nutsville.
I agree with that. The GOP’s nonsense (my opinion) impeachment of Clinton helped get us to this point. Not that it wouldn’t have happened anyway, and not that how the congressional Democrats had managed 40 years of single-party rule didn’t play a huge role . . . but that was a “tipping point”.
These days, with social media, everyone if they wish at any hour of the day can revel in the rubble of the old MSM filter.
Sounds like the real problem here is that the media can no longer act as gatekeepers of information, and no longer have their birthright role of telling the hoi poloi what to think.
The Clinton impeachment was about sex; the Trump impeachment is about whether a president abused his position as head of state.
Which is essentially a lie, and I’m not sure that the author doesn’t know it’s a lie. I think he might. And you want to know why you guys aren’t the gatekeepers of information anymore, this is why. The Trump impeachment, like the Clinton impeachment, is about ideology and partisanship and trying to game the system to void the results of democratic elections.
By the author’s standard, the Clinton impeachment was about lying under oat and fraudulent actions as governor of Arkansas, not sex. While Trump’s impeachment is, from what I can gather, about whether or not he’s violated campaign finance laws.
Trump, by contrast, this week called Democrats “pirates” and the Ukraine investigation “a disgrace to our country” and “another witch hunt.”
And the problem, as it so often does, seems to be rooted in the “common man” and “blustery douchebag” way Trump expresses himself.
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the media has never gotten over losing sole possession of the megaphone.
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And the thing they don’t get is that they need to sell their ideology not just enforce it wherever possible. They think they can argue a fact that the media is unbiased, but it isn’t a logical game. People aren’t going to just go “yeah, you guys are right – I’ll do what my TV tells me to do.”
This current left is the kind that come around every century or so and they are toxic. And the way they run culture is a blueprint of how they will run government if given half a chance.
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This is funny, how Snopes fact-checks the Babylon Bee…
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Do they fact-check The Onion?
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Remember this?
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/georgia-lawmaker-go-back-claim/
Supposedly Snopes didn’t bother to fact check the original allegation..
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The most Westchester thread ever is the one on my Facebook feed concerning the name of the John Jay Indians high school.
So much virtue signalling it looks like the Chicago Board of Trade soybean pit ahead of an earlier-than-expected killing frost.
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Is the objection to “Indians”, “John Jay”, or both?
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Indians…
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aannnnddd.. someone (not me) said something about political correctness and the thread was shut down
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The rogues gallery of legal influence peddling:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/hunter-bidens-legal-socially-acceptable-corruption/598804/
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has anyone seen poll numbers on this whole kerfuffle? Not seeing many reported in the press, so the left must not be getting much traction…
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I haven’t seen nor heard of any. I’m assuming some have been done, at least privately, and it’s not polling well.
Meantime, no matter what they try Trump has polled near or better than Obama at the same time in his presidency. And he won.
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/current_events/politics/prez_track_sep27
I feel like there are going to be some disappointed folks in 2020.
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https://apnews.com/de789d3d5f204adb8f05b852e6de50f6
again, they got greedy. don’t bill so much and this flies through
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What a coincidence.
https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/27/intel-community-secretly-gutted-requirement-of-first-hand-whistleblower-knowledge/
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A previous version of the whistleblower complaint document, which the ICIG and DNI until recently provided to potential whistleblowers, declared that any complaint must contain only first-hand knowledge of alleged wrongdoing and that complaints that provide only hearsay, rumor, or gossip would be rejected.
This seems to me to be a much better standard. Yet another way Trump is lowering the standards . . . or the Deep State is lowering standards because of Trump. Either or.
The complainant also cites publicly available news articles as proof of many of the allegations.
I think that points to it clearly being political strategery rather than legitimate “whistleblowing”. It’s “throwing the kitchen sink” at the argument–not actually “whistleblowing” when you start quoting publicly available sources and the media. That’s the behavior of someone trying to make a case and prosecute, not just blow the whistle on inappropriate actions they heard about from a friend who heard about it from a friend who heard it from another Trump was messing around.
The anti-Trump complaint also made several false claims that have been directly refuted and debunked. While the complaint alleged that Trump demanded that Ukraine physically return multiple servers potentially related to ongoing investigations of foreign interference in the 2016 elections, the transcript of the call between Trump and Zelensky shows that such a request was never made.
That’s the DNC’s hacked servers that–having found out they’d been hacked, the DNC sent them to Crowdstrike (which is a Ukranian company or something? Is that real?) instead of, you know, the FBI–but nothing to see there folks, move along. Anyway, what in the heck would be wrong with him demanding the return of those servers? Why weren’t they given to the FBI in the first place?
Reached by phone on Friday afternoon, a Director of National Intelligence official refused to comment on any questions about the secret revision to the whistleblower form, including when it was revised to eliminate the requirement of first-hand knowledge and for what reason.
The deep state is going to deep state.
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Welp, I’m convinced.
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That’s different because shut up.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/09/27/flashback-obama-admin-asked-ukraine-to-investigate-trump-campaign-manager-paul-manafort/
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Oh, I’m sure that never happened. Obama wouldn’t do that. Next!
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Good piece on Leninism and parallels today.
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2019/10/leninthink
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Oops.
https://www.redstate.com/bonchie/2019/09/28/senate-democrat-claimed-evidence-trump-ukraine-corruption-changes-story/
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That’s different because shut up.
https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/28/susan-rice-obama-put-call-transcripts-on-top-secret-server-too/
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For the running count of fake assaults:
Edit: Post version
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/virginia-sixth-grader-now-says-she-falsely-accused-classmates-of-cutting-her-hair/2019/09/30/ad0cbd92-e390-11e9-a331-2df12d56a80b_story.html
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I have a good friend with a son at that school.
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The key was using the incident to tar the school as tied to Pence because his wife teaches there full time.
I actually don’t blame the girl. This is a result of the current state of affairs where the kids know that claims like hers can be easily weaponized in today’s media environment. If you are in a school yard fight, you grab everything handy.
Adults don’t do the due diligence before acting on these or reporting them to the media. That’s where the primary failure lies. Sort of like leaving a loaded gun lying around the house and being surprised when the kid picks it up.
Fortunately that’s offset by today’s surveillance culture where the accused could ask that the camera footage be pulled. Because they certainly weren’t going to be considered innocent until proven guilty.
Proactive defense is the rule of the day, hence the Pence rule. Anyone can be accused of anything at any time.
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well, that’s just depressing.
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Adults don’t do the due diligence before acting on these or reporting them to the media.
So much this.
Fortunately that’s offset by today’s surveillance culture
I didn’t see anything in the WaPo article about how it was determined it was faked. If it was just an admission, or there was evidence that it didn’t happen.
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Fairfax County police got involved. They checked the video surveillance and the story didn’t match the video.
Local news (as usual) covered the actual facts better than the national news.
“During the investigation of the girl’s accusations, security camera video showed where people were at the time of the alleged attack, the family’s attorney said, and it became clear the girl’s account could not be true based on the day and time she said it happened.”
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/6th-Grade-Girl-Says-She-Lied-About-Boys-Cutting-Her-Dreadlocks-561784531.html
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You would think if the US was as irredeemably racist as the left believes, they wouldn’t have to invent hate crimes….
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The problem is the super-nutritive petri dish that belief creates–it provides so many incentives for people to fake hate crimes, and since the left celebrates victimhood–well, that’s another incentive. Because the debunking of faked hate crimes is so under-reported, and public skepticism of very fishy sounding hatecrimes, is not tolerated–it gives individuals the impression that faking a hatecrime is easy and will get them all sorts of attention and up their victim-cred, etc.
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super-nutritive petri dish that belief creates
Well played! If originally yours, noteworthy.
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No one learned anything from the Rolling Stone Jackie debacle.
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It is also why Dave Chappelle’s Juicy Sommelier bit struck such a nerve…
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@markinaustin: as far as I know it’s mine. I’m unaware of ever having seen it elsewhere, but that doesn’t mean it’s not derivative. I just don’t know of what. 😃
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we also feel tremendous pain for the victims and the hurt on both sides of this conflict.
Who was hurt on the false-accuser side and how?
I wondered why this story was in WaPo and the NYT and I’m thinking maybe it was to provide the NAACP spin, as it’s getting the point to where just ignoring fake hate crimes doesn’t work:
“Too often in these rare instances of fabricated hate crimes, critics use a broad brush to claim racially motivated crimes are virtually non-existent,” the organization stated. “This is demonstrably wrong. Data from numerous sources, including the Anti-Defamation League, the FBI, and the Justice Department, shows bias motivated crimes are on the rise, year over year.”
Still, they didn’t lead with the spin. Maybe white lefties and males generally (depending on the hate crime) are beginning to realize this can just be as easily weaponized against them?
Also: rare instances? By some counts I think it could be said fake hate crimes outnumber real ones, especially ones that seem very unlikely to any thinking person but the perp isn’t caught. Because in some many of those, if the perp ever is caught . . . turns out it was fake.
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“Who was hurt on the false-accuser side and how? ”
The reporting was that the girl was still bullied, but it wasn’t to the extent that it was reported, i.e. with the racial aspect.
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Do we know if she was actually bullied? Seems that the hair cutting lie casts doubt on the bullying accusation, no?
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They are waiting for you to take that bait…
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I tend to doubt that she randomly decided to target three random kids one day.
This seems to be more like the classic school yard tifts that stayed in the school yard before social media existed.
I don’t feel a need to superimpose a perp/victim framing on either side.
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There’s also the question as to what qualifies as bullying. It’s different now than when I was a youth.
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“I wondered why this story was in WaPo and the NYT”
The connection to Pence via his wife teaching at the school.
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But is that why the wrote the article acknowledging the hate crime aspect was fake? I can get why they were covering it when they thought it had to real because of course Pence’s wife works at a racist school. But the reveal that it was once again one of those so rare it never happens fake hate crimes is the thing I’m surprised they covered at all. “There’s bigger news!”
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Local media reported that it was fake and the national media knew that they would be easily open to accusations of bias if they didn’t follow up on their own pieces to acknowledge that.
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This is a good piece.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/09/26/the-genius-of-the-islam-is-right-about-women-stunt/
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The linked piece too:
“A billboard poster bearing the Google definition of the word “woman” has been removed after it was accused of being part of a transphobic campaign.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-45650462
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There’s nothing the far left hates more than a dictionary.
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McWing:
This is a good piece.
That is awesome. What a clever idea.
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I’m 100% for this.
I want a unifying anti-hate campaign everyone can get behind. I I start posting “Fight Islamatransphobia” flyers I wonder how that would go over.
Whoever is doing that stuff is brilliant.
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LOL!
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