Vital Statistics:
Last | Change | |
S&P futures | 3190 | 13.25 |
Oil (WTI) | 60.14 | 0.14 |
10 year government bond yield | 1.85% | |
30 year fixed rate mortgage | 3.97% |
Stocks are up this morning on trade with China. Bonds and MBS are down.
The last full workweek of 2019 won’t have much in the way of market-moving data. We will get some housing data (housing starts and existing home sales) and the third revision to Q3 GDP, but that is about it.
China agreed to purchase more agricultural products from the US as part of an agreement that canceled additional tariffs that were supposed to take effect last night. This deal should end the tit-for-tat tariffs that have been weighing down financial markets for the past several months.
More evidence of weakness in the Eurozone as the German ISM numbers were downright awful, and were echoed by weakness in the UK and France. This will be the push-pull driving interest rates in the near future: an accelerating US economy will push rates higher, while stagnation in Europe will pull them lower.
Retail Sales rose 0.2% MOM in November, which was lower than expectations. Ex autos and gas, sales were flat.
The Fed is injecting liquidity into the system to prevent a repeat of September’s cash crunch, which sent overnight repo rates up to 10% at one point.
Filed under: Economy, Morning Report |
Does anyone believe this?
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/09/27/jeff-flake-at-least-35-gop-senators-would-impeach-trump/3792866002/
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I think it would be more than zero, but probably not 35.
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Well, Romney will vote for impeachment as will Murkowski. How she does that given McConnell’s actions for her after she lost her primary is beyond me.
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Maybe it’s politically optimal for her and so she gets private dispensation?
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No. Also it’s a pointless speculation of no news value. Maybe a dozen Democrats would vote not to impeach if it were private. Maybe all Republicans would vote to impeach if they did this kind of secret vote that isn’t going to happen and would also be antithetical to representative government.
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Harvard holds the line against naval gazing for now.
Vox of course is upset.
https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/12/16/21020572/harvard-ethnic-studies-department
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Yeah, if that becomes the driving philosophy at Harvard and Yale they will cease to be schools where white people and their money are interested in paying to go.
I’ve got to guess that’s why such institutions haven’t folded yet—it would certainly be easier. But their afraid of what it might do to endowments and other sources of revenue.
Also the article bitches about tenure like it’s something a professor is entitled to, yet there isn’t the equivalent of tenure for almost any other job I can think of.
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“Peña is a leading expert in Dominican studies, making Harvard a leading school in this field as well.”
how is that even a thing? I assume we’re not talking about the Catholic religious order. Unless it’s a class on
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I get why it’s a thing but why is it such a *big* thing. There is admittedly a much larger swath of jobs available for ethnic studies and diversity majors these days, but I would assume the job pool is still far smaller than the number of people graduating with said degrees. Not that that’s important–the article kvetches for quite a while, yet never really mentions careers in those fields, or discusses how such subjects might work (even fictionally) as adjuncts to majors in business or engineering or architecture or something that ends up actually improving the world, rather than finding out who to blame for why things aren’t better.
I remember talking to the guy who did my yardwork about 20 years ago. He was telling me his college age daughter had a number of black colleges she wanted to go to (he himself never graduated high school, but got his GED, and had been doing yardwork and odd jobs for all his life and had put away enough money to send his kids to college). He told me he told her wasn’t going to let her go to some black college where there was nothing but black people telling her she never had to do anything because white people were bad. He wanted her to go to a real college, where she’d get a real education and be right in there competing with everybody.
I don’t know that he was right about the quality of education at a given all black college–but it looks like a lot of people want to turn every institution of higher learning into a school where all the degrees are in racial grievance.
Which is not good for the people getting those educations. It seems modern racism has manifested a way of denying minorities a real education by telling them it’s their right to learn about nothing but racial grievance and talk about who they hate and blame.
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weren’t these “disciplines” created out of whole cloth in the 1970s as a way for universities to get their diversity numbers up? And have basically just morphed into SJW training institutions.
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