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| Last | Change | |
| S&P futures | 3330 | -3.6 |
| Oil (WTI) | 39.05 | -0.19 |
| 10 year government bond yield | 0.65% | |
| 30 year fixed rate mortgage | 2.89% |
Stocks are flattish this morning despite some positive economic data. Bonds and MBS are flat.
The final revision for Q2 GDP came in at -31.4%. Personal Consumption Expenditures fell by 34.1%.
The ADP Jobs report indicated the economy added 749,000 jobs in September, which was higher than the 650k expectation. The Street is looking for 900k jobs in Friday’s report. Note that the ADP numbers have been coming in well below the actual BLS numbers. Meanwhile, companies like Disney and mall operator Brookfield are shedding jobs.
Mortgage Applications fell 5% last week as purchases declined 2% and refis fell by 7%. “Despite the decline in rates, refinances fell over 6 percent, driven by a 9 percent drop in conventional refinance applications,” said Joel Kan, MBA Associate Vice President of Economic and Industry Forecasting. “There are indications that refinance rates are not decreasing to the same extent as rates for home purchase loans, and that could explain last week’s decline in refinances. Many lenders are still operating at full capacity and working through operational challenges, ultimately limiting the number of applications they are able to accept.”
A group of about 85,000 landlords filed a suit challenging the Center for Disease Control’s edict to ban evictions.
New York Fed President John Williams thinks it will take about 3 years to get back to full employment. When asked about the Fed’s 2% inflation target, he responded: “We need to make sure that we’re purposely overshooting that moderately for some time to get that balance,” Williams told reporters. “To me, success is not some arithmetic or some formula but it’s really this notion of inflation expectations, how people think about what’s inflation going to be in the future.” The Fed is desperately trying to avoid what Japan has experienced, which is deflationary expectations being anchored for a generation. Young people in Japan are notorious savers, and consumption drives the economy.
Filed under: Economy, Morning Report |
All Things in Moderation 
NYT front page is now leading with “analysis” (aka opinion) rather than hard news:
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Trump should have taken that opportunity to force Wallace to define white supremacy. Does it mean the KKK? Sure, I’ll denounce that.
Does it mean income inequality? Does it mean reparations? If I am against reparations does that mean I support white supremacy?
He missed a big opportunity there.
The problem with the term “white supremacy” is that it the critical race theorists define it as virtually everything, while mainstream democrats know what a turnoff that is to everyone else. Wallace isn’t about to go there, so Trump needs to.
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Correct.
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On occasion though they still have a worthwhile nugget buried deep. This is good, if only for cluing in the NYT readership about what’s really going on.
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This may not resonate here and I don’t think there’s anyway to stop this runaway train but I thought it was at least interesting.
Barrett, a federal appeals judge, has declined to publicly discuss her decades-long affiliation with People of Praise, a charismatic Christian group that opposes abortion and holds that men are divinely ordained as the “head” of the family and faith. Former members have said the group’s leaders teach that wives must submit to the will of their husbands. A spokesman for the organization has declined to say whether the judge and her husband, Jesse M. Barrett, are members.
But an analysis by The Associated Press shows that People of Praise erased numerous records from its website during the summer of 2017 that referred to Barrett and included photos of her and her family. At the time, Barrett was on Trump’s short list for the high court seat that eventually went to Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Last week, when Barrett again emerged as a front-runner for the court, more articles, blog posts and photos disappeared. After an AP reporter emailed the group’s spokesman Wednesday about members of Jesse Barrett’s family, his mother’s name was deleted from the primary contact for the South Bend, Indiana, branch. All issues of the organization’s magazine, “Vine and Branches,” were also removed.
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2020/09/30/faith-group-deletes-mentions-of-barrett-from-its-website/24635483/
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To me the cult of anti-racism is so weird i am not going to get bent out of shape over this..
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Dude sends out his brood mare to earn the bread while he kicks back and eats bon bons. Hats off to him for keeping her in her place, … on the Supreme Court.
I doubt this woman will ever be free of the patriarchy and she deserves our pity.
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George, that was well said. Thanks.
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Religious faith is one of those deeply held personal matters that shape who many of us are. When Justices have spoken to their differences they have often explained them as not partisan in the political sense, but often as driven by who they are personally, which in recent years have been divisions of gender and religious faith, in many cases. And it is not predictable by surface labeling.
For example, there are both fundamentalists and modernists among Catholics and Jews, just as there are among Protestants. You may recall the difference between fundamentalism and modernism in western religion is pretty much the notion on the one hand that the scriptures are immutable words of God for fundamentalists but are God inspired words of humans for modernists, and thus subject to having been incorrect, thus explaining the many contradictions in the texts.
That ACB is associated with a fundamentalist offshoot of Catholicism does make her views on family law somewhat predictable. But that is about all I can reasonably infer, especially since her writings confirm that notion. As with any judicial nominee I would be more concerned with her reputation for fairness, integrity, and knowledge. I suppose I would want her to disavow any fealty to DJT for appointing her, on the integrity front, but she has a good rep for knowledge, fairness, and integrity going into the process.
In a less partisan time it was understood that R Presidents chose R lawyers and D Presidents chose D lawyers and that the issues for the Senate were integrity-fairness-knowledge, because that is all a judge has to give in any given case. While her personality will shape her philosophy overall, that will produce results that are often unpredictable in advance, so long as fairness, integrity, and knowledge are applied in each case.
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Mark:
I suppose I would want her to disavow any fealty to DJT for appointing her…
Did you want the Wise Latina to disavow any fealty to Obama?
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Sure.
But this is in the context of a President who publicly states he wants the Supreme Court to decide the election if it is close. We know it is bluster, but it should be laid to rest. ACB will answer appropriately and I am sure will be honest about it.
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“But this is in the context of a President who publicly states he wants the Supreme Court to decide the election if it is close.”
Is there actually a fully contextualized quote of him actualy saying that with actual words? Not that I doubt that he would say that (or anything) but the press and pundits have kind of used Trump’s ability to say anything to make him say stuff he hasn’t actually said. In any case, if he has said that I missed it.
That being said: obviously, that’s wrong. I think it was wrong in 2000. Should have ultimately gone to the house, IMO. Although I know there are people who disagree with my opinion there!
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Obama appointees are a little different, as Obama isn’t a sitting president running for re-election at this point. But they can disavow anything they want to–I expect any intervention in the election will have a partisan bias for most of the jurists.
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IMHO, the Fortas, Thomas, and Kavanaugh inquiries, based on integrity allegations, were required, and the opposition to Harriet Meiers was justified on knowledge and experience grounds. The outstanding example of a purely partisan inquiry was Bork. Given no allegations of scandal arise, the inquiry here will be limited. In the recent past, that would have led to an overwhelming majority approval, but she only got around 55 votes for the 7th Circuit appointment, and that will probably be repeated. In those contentious hearings, she vowed to separate her religious views from her judicial obligations, and to the extent one can do that I am sure she meant it. She wrote a law review article many years ago in which she argued that where a Catholic judge opposed the death penalty on the basis of the church’s teachings the judge ought to recuse himself rather than deal with a conflict of religious views and legal obligations that might be prejudicial. I have no doubt that she has given this much honest thought.
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Barrett, a federal appeals judge, has declined to publicly discuss her decades-long affiliation with People of Praise, a charismatic Christian group that opposes abortion and holds that men are divinely ordained as the “head” of the family and faith.
There should be some reasonable and at least thoughtful contemplation of the cognitive dissonance between the idea that Barrett is subservient to her husband, basically chattel, but is also likely to be a SCOTUS judge and has had a high-powered career for the majority of her adult life. I’m not sure what they are really implying here, except perhaps that being a member of a group that declares men the head of the family has absolutely no effect on the woman’s career success, independence, and capacity to have it all.
Last week, when Barrett again emerged as a front-runner for the court, more articles, blog posts and photos disappeared.
Interesting. Likely administration or other activist folks have reached out them to scrub Barrett from the website, probably not their idea. Although I think that’s stupid. I don’t think it hurts Trump or the administration to turn attacks on Barret’s fundamentalist association to a a referendum on perceived hostility towards Christianity and Christians from the left/Democratic party. Just strategically.
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