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Let the mutherfuker burn!
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| Last | Change | |
| S&P futures | 3823 | -23.3 |
| Oil (WTI) | 51.64 | -1.44 |
| 10 year government bond yield | 1.09% | |
| 30 year fixed rate mortgage | 2.86% |
Stocks are lower this morning as earnings continue to come in. Bonds and MBS are up.
Delinquencies fell in December to 6.08%, the lowest level since April, according to Black Knight Financial Services. This is down 3.9% compared to November, but is up 78% on a YOY basis.
The MBA is requesting a $25 billion housing assistance fund. “We are requesting that you include a $25 billion Housing Assistance Fund, modeled on the Hardest Hit Fund, to provide funds to state housing finance agencies to help homeowners with COVID-19 hardships bring their mortgage loans current through targeted assistance,” the letter said. “The funds would be used for mortgage payment assistance, utility payments, property tax assessments and other support to prevent eviction, mortgage delinquency, default, foreclosure or loss of utility services.”
Flagstar reported fourth quarter earnings numbers that revealed that gain on sale margins are beginning to compress. “Our mortgage team continues to deliver, achieving revenues of $232 million for the quarter. While gain on sale margins did compress, we were pleased with how well they held up, finishing at 1.93 percent for the quarter. The team’s all-out efforts—coupled with our diverse, multi-channel mortgage platform—made it possible for us to deliver a quality experience to customers all year long in the face of unprecedented volumes. It will be interesting to see if this margin compression continues through 2021.
United Wholesale completed its merger with the Gores SPAC and should begin trading today under the new ticker UWMC. Third quarter originations were $54 billion for the company.
The three hottest real estate markets are Austin TX, Phoenix, and Nashville. The coldest are New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. “The pandemic has not upended the housing market so much as accelerated trends we saw coming into 2020,” said Zillow senior economist Jeff Tucker. “These Sun Belt destinations are migration magnets thanks to relatively affordable, family-sized homes, booming economies and sunny weather. Record-low mortgage rates and the increased demand for living space, coupled with a surge of millennials buying their first homes, will keep the pressure on home prices there for the foreseeable future.”
The PMI Flash index shows manufacturing and services perking up. Growth is the fastest since the start of 2015, however keep in mind that it is exaggerated given the drop in activity last year. The index did note that supply chain constraints are creating a backdrop for inflation.
Filed under: Economy, Morning Report |
All Things in Moderation 
I was w-w-rong about the Impeachment strategy. I thought the Ds would wait at least a month to send over the Article so Biden could get his appointments and COVID agendas done without the sideshow.
Ds making a tactical error IMHO sending Article over so soon. Also, I think they will do a dog and pony show for the whole Senate, further disrupting ordinary procedure, when the smart choice would be to present to a Select Committee.
But no one asked me.
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so the left is going to burn political capital impeaching someone who is no longer in office?
fine with me
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I fucking love a spectacle and I know the Republican base wants clarity from their Senators on their position prior to primary election deadlines. 20 Republican incumbents are up for election.
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I will literally sacrifice my left nut for Trump to show up everyday for the trial, sitting at the defense table. I’ll give both nuts if he testifies!!!!
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Wasting time. Apparently the new admin plans to do everything via executive order, so might not really matter if congress does anything else.
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impeachment, and a stimulus package and then everything will stop.
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… except Executive Orders? I feel like there are going to be a lot more executive orders. Why not? They are easy and cheap.
Speaking of Executive Orders, didn’t Trump trying to overturn DACA establish the precedent that a new president had to wait like a year-and-a-half and do all this other crap to overturn an existing EO? Or was that just for Trump? Or just for Republicans?
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I am assuming the EOs as a lost cause. The only good thing about them is they can get reversed during the next R admin.
I think the left is going to overreach, as usual.
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Not sure when the next R administration is going to be the mail-in ballot standard of “it’s here, there’s a line on it, it’s a vote for the Democrat” standard remains.
There was a tweet that went around of the Biden sudden vote jump saying “I guess sudden spikes of votes are only bad when they happen for Democrats, because they happen for Republicans all the time”.
And it had a bunch of similar graphs for Republicans which I assume are accurate because they all clearly showed that votes for both candidates spiked at same time, not just votes for a single candidate.
That sort of thing (along with many other things) makes me suspect that unless future elections are substantially different than the 2020 elections, or Republicans figure out a way to steal a bunch of votes in urban areas, or turn out enough Republicans in urban areas that the vote count would have to substantially exceed the population or something) it may be a while before there’s another Republican administration.
Though it’s not just that. The left has the corporations in addition to the media and academia. And most other institutions, and the unions, and the government bureaucracy almost everywhere. I feel like Republicans are going to be fighting from the house, if anywhere.
But will be happy to be proven wrong!
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I’m not worried about the media and cultural assault on Trump as it had no effect. Trumps approval, according to pollsters that were very accurate this cycle (and the last) have him in the high forties. Plus, he gained 10 million votes in the election. I know of no recent, or even distant POTUS that it has happened to. It’s unprecedented. If the media had ANY effect you wouldn’t see that.
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Rasmussen has him at 51%. Which I expect is accurate. I don’t know how much I worry about the media except that their switch from Big Brother propaganda about the evils of Nazi Trump to gross dawning sycophancy over dear leader seems even grosser to me this time than usual.
Press has influence but it’s waning. Big Tech is probably more influential now. And academia to some extent.
Even so, all the censorship and deplatforming could backfire. IMO.
Eh, we shall see.
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McWing:
If the media had ANY effect you wouldn’t see that.
I think that if the media didn’t have any effect, Biden wouldn’t be president. The legacy media may not have the influence it once had, but I don’t see how there is any way that the relentless media attacks on Trump and constant attempts to destroy his presidency didn’t have any effect.
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I think the media helps motivate certain folks who might otherwise not engage and also sets the tone for low information voters and generally conversations. It certainly doesn’t help that they conceal facts and fact-check things but how well the conform to the narrative and not in regards to their actual accuracy.
Forbes just fact-checked the complaints that a Biden has flip-flopped on a fracking ban and said basically that it’s a false accusation, some mean people just confused the issue. That’s not a fact check—thats spin like a PR flack.
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The latest poll says only 18% of Republicans trust the media. I think they played their last card. I don’t think Republicans are watching the mainstream media any more.
Why would they? It is like expecting liberals to watch Rush Limbaugh 24/7
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I feel like they are going to keep playing ace after ace, blithely pulling them from their sleeves, for the next year or two at least. But once you’re below 20% basically nobody believes you any more, IMO. I think it is 48% of people generally? So more than half the country thinks they are full of shit, and not actually doing anything remotely like journalism any more.
There’s only so long you can claim “WE’RE OBJECTIVE JOURNALISTS!” while spewing out hot garbage that plays like the worst kind of infomercial.
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this was never about what he did or didn’t do in office.
he beat Hillary.
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yep. Government is the Democrat’s toy, not to be used by other parties.
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“Ds making a tactical error IMHO sending Article over so soon.”
It depends on if impeaching Trump is a priority. The longer they waited the more absurd it looked to have a trial after he was out of office.
Wait 100 days and everyone would view it as pointless and wonder why they were bringing it up.
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I feel there is a big youth influence behind the scenes on a lot of these decisions. Folks under 40 and probably a lot folks barely 30. These politicians aren’t writing these EOs and position papers and whatnot themselves.
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The young believe in industrial policy. They think they can engineer the perfect society. We are going to re-do the 1960s economically. They’ll take control, fuck it up, and then we’ll get another Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan.
The Fed is already 100% engineering the bond market. There is no market there any more.
The difference between now and the 1960s is that we have a sovereign debt bubble. God knows how that is going to turn out.
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You probably have a better idea how that bubble popping will go than I do. Even if it doesn’t I’m feeling like the clamping down on market forces is just gonna tank the economy, or at least the mid-to-small-size business part of the economy. The big corporations seem to hold a lot of sway so they probably aren’t going to feel a lot of drag until the bottom-run consumers start checking out in serious numbers, because they have to. So far the markets seem AOK with the EOs, etc., as far as I can tell. Not looking forward to what the future brings.
But again, hoping to be proved wrong.
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The thing about bond or currency crisis is that they don’t matter until they matter…. And then they are the ONLY thing that matters.
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FWIW, the thing the left should be fearing is Bitcoin… So many resources are going to get sucked out of the economy and people move their money to escape the government’s grubby hands..
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Concur. But there are a lot of governments interested in killing Bitcoin and replacing it with government-run digital currencies that the government has control over. Or they might essentially nationalize BitCoin in some form.
I don’t think they will continue to let cash they can’t touch run free.
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I am amazed that the left thinks the riot was a coup attempt. I don’t think it is hyperbole, I think they really believe it.
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There is no way a rational person can believe it was a coup attempt or insurrection. It’s boob bait for their lunatic base.
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You can if your view is sufficiently distorted, and for many of them I expect it is. When a bunch of #MeToo protesters occupy Nancy Pelosi’s office and stage a sit in and AOC comes and gives them moral support, none of that is scare because you may not like their uppity-ness, but you’re all on the same side. Basically. You know they aren’t going to murder you.
When you see a bunch of Trump supporters and believe them to be, by and large, white supremacist Nazis who will gladly murder you to establish their American reich, then you will see what is like 12% more than what lefty protestors have done–recently–and something quite less if you expand your comparison to beyond the Capitol Building–as being 10,000 times worse.
I think a lot of them believe it was a coup attempt, and a whole lot of people on their side–most of them, probably–believe it was an insurrection unlike anything that has ever been seen in the history of America. Which is a problem.
And it feeds their narrative. Yes, they want to deplatform and censor any kind of dissent, anyway, but this sort of stuff–as they perceive it–just proves just HOW RIGHT THEY ARE to demand deplatforming, censorship, possibly re-education. It justifies their double-standards.
Capitol Hill rioters (most by accident, some few on purpose) just gave the Democrats and the left such a huge gift with that nonsense. It’s got to be a little like finding proof of God, that they were “right all along about everything”.
Ah, well. Catch you in the gulags, comrade.
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Given Jonah Goldberg’ latest, he is bitching up for the left too.
It is why I checked out. Luckily most of their mendacity is limited to culture, and if you don’t consume, you don’t see it.
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Correct. First set of post-inauguration Commentary podcasts: same. They were practically sounded like lefties. All of what Ace calls “Conservative, Inc.” has the TDS and buys into a lot of the fictional mainstream narratives about anything that happens or happened around Trump and his supporters.
Crazy world!
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When you see a bunch of Trump supporters and believe them to be, by and large, white supremacist Nazis who will gladly murder you to establish their American reich, then you will see what is like 12% more than what lefty protestors have done–recently–and something quite less if you expand your comparison to beyond the Capitol Building–as being 10,000 times worse.
But Pelosi et al don’t actually believe it. They’re rational actors, not NYT jobs. Only a nut job believes it.
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“Only a nut job believes it”
I tend to believe that in terms of Trump, his supporters, and the peasant class generally, most of those people are–as a practical matter–functionally delusional. I’m not saying they aren’t cynical and don’t lie and do things for completely self-serving and cynical reasons, I’m just saying 25,000 National Guard troops–and then kicking out suspected Trump-supporters because they might represent a danger to Biden and Democrats–and literally asking for mounted chain fed machine guns as Pelosi apparently did ( https://www.air.tv/watch?v=tYP3iGpyROSmOCBgQZDE6Q ) or supposedly did (who knows, maybe it’s all another psyops).
But I’ve known enough people who function well enough in terms of day-to-day life and even very successful who, in other areas, were basically insane.
So until I get direct and hard evidence they didn’t believe it was an insurrection, I’m going to assume they did. Sure they are fudging at the edges but that’s because they need to fudge a little so EVERYBODY KNOWS HOW AWFUL IT WAS (and facts don’t always do that; but that’s just “truth over facts”).
They are swept up by the narrative.
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I think a lot of them believe it was a coup attempt, and a whole lot of people on their side–most of them, probably–believe it was an insurrection unlike anything that has ever been seen in the history of America. Which is a problem.
Couldn’t disagree more. They most emphatically do not believe it was an insurrection.
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Well, then, you think they are less hysterical and more aware than I do. Sure, some of them are probably being cynical about that and everything else. But I think very, very many smart and successful people believe that was a serious insurrection and which Democrats and Pence were almost lynched because they are hysterical and completely out-of-touch with the broader reality. And they acted like it, IMO.
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apitol Hill rioters (most by accident, some few on purpose) just gave the Democrats and the left such a huge gift with that nonsense. It’s got to be a little like finding proof of God, that they were “right all along about everything”.
As they say, you can’t rape the willing. This was going to be done regardless.
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Yes, but it has to be so much more satisfying this way, don’t you think?
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They do. It’s Woke 9-11 as Glenn Greenwald puts it.
What I do think the Trump supporters intended to do was to stop the electoral college ballot count. But I doubt they had much of a plan after that.
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Some of them. I expect a lot of them were just there as a show of moral support so that congresscritters “did the right thing”. Normal protest. That’s the problem, as summer demonstrated, with mobs. It only takes a handful of bad actors to make things go to shit. Once that permission is given, other people in a mob will often do stupid stuff they otherwise never would.
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I think many, maybe most, of them do. Of course, they want to believe it. It’s orgasmic to believe it. It confirms all their priors. It was a shining gift, wrapped up with a bow.
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Hope it was worth it for the show:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2021/01/21/national-guard-senate-garage/
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Worth noting:
Repurposing. That’s the term of art now.
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The press is generally a PR firm for Democrats and ideological views beneficial to their benefactors–Big Tech, Big Pharma, the CCP. As far as I can tell, anyway.
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Dems in House demand an FBI investigation into Twitter rival Parler.
Thank goodness we got rid of the dangerous authoritarian in the White House.
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So he couldn’t move to another platform and write mean tweets!
The world is saved!
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Sounds legit. Also bizarre. Why not Gab where all the people who were on Parler actually are right now? Suppose that’s coming.
But they are also stupid. Pretty sure Gab has engineers working on a federated version if they need to switch up. There are already federated YouTube and Facebook clones.
You can make social media and even social media sites that can’t be taken down. Brave browser just implemented ipfs in-browser, which means one day anyone could potentially set up a federated website. Not dependent on any particular server or even DNS to any great degree. Basically BitTorrent in browser form.
They may be able to remove the financial incentives but this idea they are going to scrub the Internet of dissent is stupid.
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I suspect you are right. If the Chinese Communist Party can’t block people from communicating, the Woke Left won’t be able to either.
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That they think they can just says volume about their ignorance. And they really do think they can, I’m convinced. That Big Tech is so ignorant at so many levels about the technology, or just (insanely) assumes they’ve got control and no other technology will be relevant, Google will always be in power or whatever . . . it’s just nuts. And when Mozilla (FireFox) starts opining about blocking things like Gab and Parler and Fox News as the browser/DNS level, the people saying these things have got be both not actually that technically savvy and not running their brilliant ideas for the new tech authoritarianism by any of their engineers. Before they go running off at the mouth.
There are many federated websites that perform great. Video streaming and social media and more. And ipfs (still in it’s infancy) doesn’t require traditional DNS to resolve. And anyone firing up a browser with native IPFS can become a web server. This is all stuff that exists and will spread.
And sites like Gab and Parler can potentially go federated as well. Like is said, IPFS is not presently friendly to prompt interaction from users but that can and probably will change. They should know this and probably do to some degree, but Big Tech is filled with cocky and arrogant folks who think they’re on top now and that can’t ever change.
Block ports and IPFS 2.0 will support random port access or piggybacking on unblockable ports, like port 80. There’s always a solution, and federation of resources has been around since the beginning of the Internet. Amazing that people who have made millions and billions on the Internet don’t have a firm grasp on the fundament of the Internet: federation.
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