Brent Nyitray
Fairlington Blade
Let the mutherfuker burn!
jnc4p
Kevin S. Willis
Michigoose
lmsinca
markinaustin
Memetrics
novahockey
quarterback
ScottC
yellojktVital Statistics:
| Last | Change | |
| S&P futures | 3683 | -9.3 |
| Oil (WTI) | 48.82 | 0.24 |
| 10 year government bond yield | 0.93% | |
| 30 year fixed rate mortgage | 2.78% |
Stocks are lower this morning after yesterday’s sell-off. Bonds and MBS are flat.
Construction spending rose 0.9% MOM and 3.8% YOY. Residential construction rose 2.6% MOM and 16.2% YOY. 2021 should be a breakout year for housing construction.
Home prices increased 1.1% MOM and 8.2% YOY, according to CoreLogic. “The housing market performed remarkably well in 2020 despite the volatile economic state,” said Frank Martell, president and CEO of CoreLogic. “While we can expect to see lingering effects of COVID-19 resurgences and subsequent shutdowns in the early months of 2021, vaccine distributions and stimulus actions should revitalize economic activity and keep home purchase demand and home price growth strong.” FWIW, I believe that economists are not factoring into their forecasts that housing starts are going to rocket this year. Housing as has a huge multiplier effect and that will offset some of the COVID-driven weakness.
Many economists are forecasting mortgage rates to stay in the 2% range next year. The MBA forecasts rates will rise in the second half of next year. Personally, I don’t see that happening. The Federal government is writing checks to people in order to put money in people’s pockets. One of the most bang-for-the-buck ways to do that is to lower someone’s housing payment. The Fed wants the refi boom to last – that is partly why it is buying MBS.
What about inflation? The Fed has said it wants to target an average inflation rate, and since inflation has been below the Fed’s 2% target for years, they will have to accept inflation above the 2% target for a long time in order to get the average up. While the Fed has been pulling out all the stops trying to create inflation, that doesn’t guarantee it will be successful. Witness Japan, which has run the same playbook for a generation only to achieve deflation.
Striking while the iron is hot: Amerihome is the latest mortgage banker to file for an IPO. The company plans to raise about $250 million and the price talk values the company around $1.3 billion.
Filed under: Economy, Morning Report |
All Things in Moderation 
I wouldn’t doubt it for one second
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I would.
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I don’t trust the left further than i can throw them.
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Doesn’t mean Trump isn’t just making this up.
The person responsible for overseeing the elections in Georgia, the Secretary of State, is a Republican, not the left.
This is just Trump bullshit tweeting because he lost and wants to burn it all down with him.
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Agreed.
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jnc:
The person responsible for overseeing the elections in Georgia, the Secretary of State, is a Republican, not the left.
Elections are run locally. The Secretary of State isn’t out there setting up polling stations, checking voter ids, or counting ballots.
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But the Republicans have a role in the election process and how it’s set up … they get some blame for how messy some of this stuff looks.
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KW:
But the Republicans have a role in the election process and how it’s set up … they get some blame for how messy some of this stuff looks.
Sure, but the implication seemed to be that it didn’t make sense to think the left could engage in election fraud since the Sec State is a Republican. That doesn’t make sense to me. At the local level there are lots of people on the left with the opportunity to cheat, regardless of who the Sec State is.
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Sure, but the implication seemed to be that it didn’t make sense to think the left could engage in election fraud since the Sec State is a Republican.
That’s like saying the guy who left his doors wide open couldn’t be robbed while he was at work because he’s a cop.
That being said, they call could have done something about it but didn’t. And incentives aren’t always about party–a lot of times they are about not wanting to look incompetent or corrupt, or not wanting a particular fight, so everybody lines up to say: “Oh, it’s fine. Everything is fine here. What may look like huge oversights and massive flaws are just everything working normally. We were totally responsible and made sure this was the most secure election ever.”
I can’t see looking at the election as it proceeded and not seeing a lot of flaws, irregularities, and opportunities for fraud or (at best) sloppy implementation that looks fraudulent even if not.
I’m not comforted by the number of outrageous and lunatic voter fraud accusations coming out, either, as some of them seem almost like intentional pollution to avoid any kind of real focus on actual, legitimate questions. The whole uber-conspiracy involved China and Venezuela and Chavez and so forth seems almost like intentional disinformation to avoid too much time spent on observers being ejected (or told counting was stopping, then starting it again when they left) and the potential vulnerabilities of the Dominion voting machines (and, frankly, any electronic voting machines) and just the whole idea of accepting any ballot without any kind of verification.
And also the apparently refusal to do a real forensic audit and just recounting by counting the same votes the same way . . . anyway, lots of things give me pause, but the conversation has been obfuscated by all the nonsense.
None of which to say Trump would have won a completely fair election without irregularities. I could believe a few of the states might have gone differently without fraud/irregularities/lack of ballot validation . . . but enough to win it for Trump I seriously doubt.
Doesn’t mean the election processes in these states don’t need a serious, reform-minded audit.
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It the Republicans don’t do something about the irregularities in the election that appeared to universally work against the GOP candidate, it seems more likely the best way to burn down the GOP would be to do nothing. Not that anything he’s doing is actually helpful—at least not anything publicly.
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I hope you are right.
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I’ll also readily concede that if the roles were reversed, the Democrats would be making the exact same charges about stealing the election, ala Ohio in 2004 or the charges that the Russians hacked the voting machines in 2016 (remember the “statistical discrepancies” that were cited by Stein to drive her recount efforts) . And it would still be BS, although the media would give the charges by the Democrats more credibility than the exact same charges by the Republicans.
But they are still both BS. My view is pretty much the same as Taibbi’s:
Here’s where the SoS comes in:
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Good reality check:
“Trump’s Final Insult
By Kevin D. Williamson
January 5, 2021 6:30 AM”
https://www.nationalreview.com/the-tuesday/trumps-final-insult/
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The R party will be fine.
There is always going to be a need for a party to represent people who believe in freedom, free markets, low taxes and don’t believe in woke pieties, do-gooder social engineering or an overweening nanny state.
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I see very few of those things being pursued by Republicans in the Trump era. It’s mostly more spending, activist trade policy and a desire to repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
Sure the Democrats may well be worse, but the Reagan era of the Republican party appears to be finally over.
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I am guessing they return to their roots when Trump is gone.
The left is about to get its turn under the microscope.
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By whom?
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My guess is that something similar happened with Nixon.
Nixon certainly didn’t govern like a Republican – he instituted price and wage controls, created the EPA, all leftist type solutions. And he left under a cloud.
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And “affirmative action”, Brent.
Although he intended it as union busting – break the seniority system.
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Repealing 230 seems like a bad idea to me. I liked the Middle East policy and I’m for calling out China as a hostile power and economic frenemy. His approach was less than perfect but at least he seemed to be treating the China-problem like an actual problem.
I think the fiscal conservative is generally gone from the GOP but even when they talked a good game there wasn’t a lot of fiscally conservative governance.
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Thank you for this JNC, I was beginning to think everyone here was just ignoring what has been going on re Trump and the Republican Party.
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Agreed Lms, the lockdown was horrifically bad policy.
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McWing I have no idea if the lockdowns have worked, done more damage or what, but Trump has jumped the shark this year regardless.
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Agreed, the quarantine was the ultimate shark jumping action.
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Clearly he jumped the shark—his ratings were way down!
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so has the left
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“but Trump has jumped the shark this year regardless.”
In particular, after the election.
It’s one of the reasons that despite all the things that Scott, et. al. cites that Trump has done that I happen to agree with or have no problem with, I still couldn’t justify voting for him because he’s been getting worse throughout his entire term of office.
He’s more erratic than ever and while some of that may well be caused by the nature of his opposition, he’s not fit to hold the office. And the people who surround him don’t counterbalance it, they make it worse. The departure of Barr being a case in point when Trump dismissed him because he refused to fabricate election fraud.
And if anyone believes that Barr was somehow covering for the Democrats or the left, then I simply don’t know what to say to them at this point.
I will however concede that I’m not hopeful about the Biden presidency at all. Things can certainly get worse. The best outcome I can see at this point is for the Republicans to hold the Senate and therefore have divided government.
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jnc:
He’s more erratic than ever and while some of that may well be caused by the nature of his opposition, he’s not fit to hold the office.
Have you ever read The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk? I view Trump as analogous to Captain Queeg.
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jnc:
BTW, I agree with this:
And if anyone believes that Barr was somehow covering for the Democrats or the left, then I simply don’t know what to say to them at this point.
But then again I have always thought Barr was a stand-up guy, even when he was was being slammed as a Trump toady by NeverTrumpers every time he did something seen to be in Trump’s interests.
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Joe, think of a 50-50 D Senate this way: it cannot go further left than Joe Manchin’s vote. That comforts me.
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“I view Trump as analogous to Captain Queeg.”
That’s a good analogy. I saw the movie with Humphrey Bogart and Fred MacMurray but haven’t read the book.
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McWing was saying Trump was going to lose in a landslide since March.
Not sure anyone is ignoring Trump, per se, but I’m done with his vote challenges until he actually accomplished something.
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No problem lmsinca. On PL I’m the right wing nut job. On ATiM I’m the left wing nut job.
Or as Spinal Tap put it:
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jnc:
On ATiM I’m the left wing nut job.
I don’t think there is a single person here who thinks that, and I don’t think it is a fair comparison to PL.
My own view is not that you are of the left, but rather that you don’t fully appreciate how dangerous and powerful the left is relative to the right in the US. You seem to think (as suggested by your Spinal Tap clip) that they are equal and opposite political forces, and I think that just isn’t true, and hasn’t been for a very long time. If ever. Which is why my preference isn’t seeing R’s elected, but is rather seeing D’s not elected, and why I can agree with most things you say about Trump, while still preferring to see him win.
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Haha Jnc, pretty sure I’m considered the real left wing nut job here. I left the PL because I couldn’t take the incendiary comments from either side and found myself arguing with those from the left as often as I did from the right. I remember defending NoVA over and over.
Anywhoo, I’m glad to see Trump leaving but I think he’s left a poison pill among the Republicans and I too prefer a divided government which apparently we’re not really going to get.
I do think there won’t be too many truly progressive legislative moves because there are still quite a few more centrist dems in the Senate who won’t stand for some of it.
I was not an election denier in 2016 and really never have been one. I believe in our election system for some unpopular reason and the will of the people still swings left to right and back again even though most of our elected officials are clueless TBH.
I do like Raphael Warnock though and I’m glad he won.
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I do like Raphael Warnock though and I’m glad he won.
His ex-wife’s feet notwithstanding.
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“but is rather seeing D’s not elected”
Trump is counterproductive to that. He’s united the Democratic coalition more effectively than anything else could have.
Originally this was counterbalanced by the fact that Trump was the only Republican presidential candidate who could bring non-voters out to vote for him, but I think that after four years of his administration with little to show for his original populist agenda and his infighting with other Republicans that’s no longer sufficient.
By the way, the data from 2018 and 2020 show that the shift wasn’t in more minorities turning out as the whole Stacey Abrams narrative would have it, but rather white college educated voters shifting away from Trump and the Republicans. It will be interesting to see if that sticks.
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I think he’s left a poison pill among the Republicans
Meh, I think the GOP is perfectly capable of poisoning itself without Trump.
I too prefer a divided government which apparently we’re not really going to get.
Well, for at least two years. It happens. The Republicans tend to waste their mandates when they win everything and the Dems, too, can have issues. And there are schisms amongst the Democrats, so there may be at least some gridlock.
I’m glad you like Warnock. I don’t *think* I do. But it’s so hard to tell with politicians. His website is mostly a lot of euphemisms and non-specific-ness. Not saying Loeffler was better. And I don’t live in Georgia so it ain’t really my business, I don’t guess.
Ultimately . . . should be interesting. Likely Republicans will take back the house in 2022. Not guaranteed but, historically, likely. Ironically, the house may be where Republicans can still win in the future, whereas the presidency and the senate may become more permanently Democratic. Eh, we shall see.
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“I don’t think it is a fair comparison to PL.”
Yeah, it’s not really the same especially these days. They engage in group sociopathic death fantasies about their political opponents.
At some of them really mean it and the rest nod along.
“how dangerous and powerful the left is relative to the right in the US.”
Maybe, but the actual hard left isn’t synonymous with the Democratic Party either. Pelosi got a severed pigs head in her driveway from the Antifa for being too “corporate” and moderate.
One of the potential good things about the election being over and Democratic officeholders no longer having to worry about helping Trump is that they can start to admit the truth about the rioters and crack down.
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they can start to admit the truth about the rioters and crack down.
And thus proving they are the vanguard of the Democratic Party. Shock troops if you will.
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