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 | 4,061 | -6.4 |
| Oil (WTI) | 59.84 | 1.22 |
| 10 year government bond yield | 1.68% | |
| 30 year fixed rate mortgage | 3.33% |
Stocks are flattish this morning on no real news. Bonds and MBS are up.
Home prices rose 10.4% YOY in February, according to CoreLogic. “Homebuyers are experiencing the most competitive housing market we’ve seen since the Great Recession. Rising mortgage rates and severe supply constraints are pushing already-overheated home prices out of reach for some prospective buyers, especially in more expensive metro areas. As affordability challenges persist, we may see more potential homebuyers priced out of the market and a possible slowing of price growth on the horizon.” I think the slowing of price growth is probably a given, since double digit price growth is generally unsustainable. That said, professional money is flooding the single family sector, and a lot of new construction will be build-to-rent. With inventory at record lows, it will take years to get supply and demand back into balance. Note every state is seeing high single digit + appreciation except one: New York.
The MBA is urging the CFPB to adopt the new QM rule without delay.
“MBA supports the General QM Final Rule’s pricing construct, which, compared to the
alternatives considered, strikes the best balance between ensuring consumers’ ability to
repay and ensuring access to responsible, affordable mortgage credit. Loan price is a holistic
measure, capturing the borrower’s credit score, income, debts, assets, debt-to-income (DTI)
ratio, and other strongly correlated indicators of a borrower’s risk of default. The Bureau’s
analysis of loan performance data demonstrates that loan price is a strong proxy for a
borrower’s ability to repay. Specifically, the Bureau’s analysis indicates that for loans within a
given DTI ratio range, those with higher rate spreads consistently had higher early
delinquency rates, and loans with lower rate spreads had relatively low early delinquency
rates.”
Loans in forbearance fell again last week to 4.9% of servicer portfolios. “The share of loans in forbearance decreased for the fifth straight week, and new forbearance requests dropped to their lowest level since March 2020,” said Mike Fratantoni, MBA Senior Vice President and Chief Economist. “The share of loans in forbearance also decreased for all three investor categories. “More than 21 percent of borrowers in forbearance extensions have now exceeded the 12-month mark. Of those that exited forbearance in March, more than 21 percent received a modification, indicating that their income had declined and they could not afford their original mortgage payment.”
There were 7.4 million job openings at the end of February, according to the JOLTS jobs report. This was an increase of 268,000 from the end of January. Hires were 5.7 million while separations were 5.5 million. The quits rate was unchanged at 2.3%.
Filed under: Economy, Morning Report |
All Things in Moderation 
This sums up my current view perfectly:
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what used to be just spin is now outright fabrication
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There’s no research. They don’t call people they are doing stories on. They are offered information on events they are reporting on, by people involved in the events, and they decline it.
There is no “news” in the news anymore.
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The big divide in “journalism” now isn’t between left and right. It’s between the liars with an agenda and those that will actually still report all the facts regardless of the narrative.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-the-us-right-to
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as if there is a “right” in journalism. There isn’t. The debate is between old school liberals who believe in a process and the leftist Millennials who view their role as the Information Ministry which is in the business of establishing the boundaries of correct thought.
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Brent:
The debate is between old school liberals who believe in a process and the leftist Millennials who view their role as the Information Ministry which is in the business of establishing the boundaries of correct thought.
I agree. The notion that there is not a huge ideological component to this problem seems to me pretty hard to defend, even if only because of the left’s domination of the media world. Although to be clear, I don’t think that domination is the only thing that drives the ideological component. As a philosophical matter increasing portions of the left are grounded in skepticism, if not outright rejection, of objective reality, and so will therefore be much less concerned about facts as facts when establishing their narrative and pushing their agenda. They don’t consider lying to be lying. They consider it to be “their truth”.
I don’t think you will hear many, if any, people on the right talking about “my truth” or “my reality”. That is strictly a left-wing/progressive phenomenon. And it matters with regard to journalism.
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There is clearly an ideological component. My argument tends to be that it’s not entirely ideological–and that hard ideologues and partisans often have “ends justify the means” approaches, irrespective of the specific ideology.
Not to mention there was a time when the left embraced many of the views of the contemporary right, where populism was a left-wing phenomenon, where authoritarian progressives were also huge nationalists and patriots, and so on.
But for what I think is an obvious reason, the common organizing political philosophies of the left–socialism, communism, etc–will always tend to end crazier, more oppressive, and more dysfunctional than the common organizing political philosophies of the right–individual liberty, free-market capitalism, checks-and-balances, etc. Decentralized power will always been less oppressive than centralized power. Incompetence will always do less damage in a free and open society than in a closed and tightly controlled one.
Communism and socialism (and related organizing philosophies) ultimately require a great deal of centralized power. So leftist power is always going to be more destructive to human liberty than right-wing power (which sometimes surrenders too much power to robber barons in the name of free markets, perhaps, but now we can all see why that’s a bad idea so maybe not so much in the future).
In regards to the media (and the new corporate wokeness) … that’s a longer discussion. But part of it is the attraction of corporate power and being “a gatekeeper of the truth” to folks on the left, and certainly in wielding that power to effect cultural and societal change.
But generally, we’re probably all doomed. And “The Modern Progressive Left” was apparently our choice of the Destroyer. 🙂
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By right I mean Fox, Alex Jones, Breitbart, etc. Also Washington Examiner & a few others.
Fox has quite a reach and has a narrative to push too.
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jnc:
The craziness surrounding reporting on the trans ideological movement is example #1 of the media going off the deep end
Yeah, they are going off the deep end, but the deep end is clearly on the left side of the pool.
Has there been an equivalent rejection of basic biological reality in the service of a conservative political agenda by reporting at Fox News?
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This is really going downhill faster than I thought possible. My son-in-law attended a sensitivity training session yesterday [in Santa Fe, for educators] where the group was told by the tranny instructor with no credentials as a social scientist but having been a self made foghorn that the use of the word homosexual was insulting, even when used to describe, say, homosexual characters in literature in an English class.
Fortunately there were no buyers of that instruction. But for a school board to amplify this nonsense is an invitation for ridicule, not just from the right, but from the majority, as witnessed by the fact that most attendees at any event in Santa Fe are not conservatives, and this group was truly unimpressed.
This does any rational civil liberty cause of the spectrum of none heterosexual and/or gender dismorphic persons no good at all. Twisting language into knots where technically correct words are insulting when used technically correctly is beyond ignorant. Mark Twain would have called it French.
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This is really going downhill faster than I thought possible.
Pre-Trump, I would never have thought it possible. Not just the critical race theory stuff but how far from the bottom the media actually was in 2016, and how far it’s raced to get to the bottom since then (especially in 2020–pandemic + election year broke something in the mainstream media, as far as I can tell).
The sudden eruption of all this stuff–especially the abandonment of words having meaning–is astounding, to me.
You recall during ACB (and based on her voting so far, at least the center-left had nothing to worry about) a congress critter told her the use of the word “sexual preference” was offensive, and one of the big online dictionaries immediately updated their definition of “sexual preference” to say it was offensive, when an hour before there had been no such reference.
Irrespective of the motivation to do so, just the idea that dictionaries can now just be updated on a whim . . . no review, no committee, no analysis of how the word has been used in media during the past year . . . that blows my mind.
But for a school board to amplify this nonsense is an invitation for ridicule, not just from the right
I’ve argued before and will likely argue again: the right and the center have no power here. It’s going to have to be left-of-center to full liberal (and perhaps some sincere progressives) who take this on.
There is an argument to be made that trans people shouldn’t be discriminated against (and that nobody should be discriminated against because of sexual orientation or gender or race or religion or disability) but that the idea that allowing people you disagree with to express their opinions is somehow victimization of you, or that traditionally understand definitions of words don’t matter if you decide that you want to be offended by their use, is destructive.
Importantly, a lot of what’s going on is destructive to the foundations that made a more egalitarian, less racist, less sexist society possible in the first place. IMO.
I think a lot of this is because the members of the school board you mention, as well as folks in politics, entertainment, and media generally–are all far too addicted to social media, and their views are thereby warped and even stunted (as so much of social media is, in fact, dominated by people under the age of 20).
So your school board spends most of their attentive, engaged time in a social media bubble where ideas about “homosexual” being an insulting term or how classes should be segregated so minorities could experience their own affinity groups are popular. It influences their perspective, especially if they were amenable to these ideas in the first place. And also affects their expectations: they think this kind of stuff will be an is being well-received, and it takes a lot to disabuse them of that notion. Especially when they confront disagreement, and then run to Twitter to salve their injured egos and are assured they are fighting the good fight and totally right about everything.
Not sure what the answer is here, but if it happens it will be the citizens at the school board meetings that make it happen. And, of course, parents withdrawing their students and finding alternatives.
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Mark:
This is really going downhill faster than I thought possible.
I actually think it has been going on for a very long time. These people and this ideology have existed in and been transforming academia for decades, and have been increasingly infiltrating corporate HR departments for well over a decade. And the D party has been tacitly, if not expressly, encouraging this nonsense since at least Obama’s election. I have been telling you for years not to dismiss all this as unimportant fringe BS.
What we are witnessing now is the fruition of decades of a conscious and deliberate attempt to undermine and transform Western values and culture. Obama was not lying to you when he victoriously declared 12 years ago that we were on the verge of a fundamental transformation of America.
But for a school board to amplify this nonsense is an invitation for ridicule, not just from the right, but from the majority, as witnessed by the fact that most attendees at any event in Santa Fe are not conservatives, and this group was truly unimpressed.
But did they ridicule it? The audience may have been universally unimpressed at a personal level, but how many of them stood up and said so to anyone responsible for it? My guess is that very few, if any pushed back. Because they know that to do so puts their job in jeopardy. That is the real disturbing aspect of all this…not that it invites ridicule, but rather that it doesn’t.
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My take is that the really disturbing part is that the training and I assume others like it are mandatory. So the pushback will not be in the hall, but will become a seething discontent that politically will leave D Party pros wondering why so many people are pissed off.
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This is certainly a risk. It seems like a likely unforced error–they don’t have to do (individually or as an overarching cultural group) all the stuff they are doing. The classic progressive approach (ironically, the one that got them to this point, but can also make progressive impulses healthy for a society) was inch-by-inch wins. Taking maybe one touchdown or two, but not trying to take a thousand at once.
The story is always that you boil a frog a degree at a time–but throwing them into a pot of boiling water just makes them jump out. This may be leading to this sort of thing, in a lot of areas. Fascinating to watch a building consumer “rebellion” in entertainment and sports. I typically skip midterm elections (not a plan, per se, I just have typically led to skipping them) but I’m not skipping them in 2022, I’ll say that.
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Mark:
So the pushback will not be in the hall, but will become a seething discontent that politically will leave D Party pros wondering why so many people are pissed off.
I can’t get inside anyone’s head, but on the evidence to date the primary reaction to this nonsense (from those who actually recognize it as nonsense) seems to be fear, not anger. People fear for their jobs if they don’t toe the line, which is precisely the intended effect. And, again on current evidence, it doesn’t seem like the D party pros have too much to worry about. D’s have been embracing this bullshit for well over a decade and it hasn’t stopped them from winning elections. Joe Biden is all in on it, and he’s now sitting in the Oval Office, pushing it from there.
Unless and until voters recognize the Democratic party for what it has become, and prioritize putting an end to this authoritarian, culture destroying ideology, it is only going to get worse and worse until it is too late. It may be already.
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That is plausible.
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No. I don’t know that they are immune, but there’s not a lot of incentive for them to do so. And not much need, nor opportunity, as just arguing that 2+2 = 4 has become a full-time job for the right.
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But even with Fox, most of the narrative is strictly on the opinions show. When Fox does straight news it trends leftwards more than rightwards. It just seems “to the right” compared to CNN and MSNBC and CBS and ABC and NBC and so forth.
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“This is really going downhill faster than I thought possible.”
Yep. I view it as a combination of the left reaction to Trump and the quarantine as accelerates. Less real life interactions as a counterbalance to social media.
“But even with Fox, most of the narrative is strictly on the opinions show.”
Fair point, although choice of what stories to cover in Fox news and the framing matters too.
“And, of course, parents withdrawing their students and finding alternatives.”
This. The other alternatives take too long if you actually have children in the system.
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jnc:
I view it as a combination of the left reaction to Trump…
As I mentioned to Mark, this has all been in the works since well before Trump arrived on the scene, and these types of “training” (ie indoctrination) sessions have been going on for over a decade. Any expansion of them occurs simply as and when the left/Democrats embrace new victim identities, which I don’t think has anything to do with Trump. To whatever extent they are a reaction to what is going on in the political world, I would think that it has been the election of supporters of this nonsense – Biden and a Democratic congress – that has emboldened them to press on full-steam ahead, not the existence of Trump. Which, frankly, shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. It was entirely predictable.
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Fair point, although choice of what stories to cover in Fox news and the framing matters too.
It does. I’m saying, especially in the latter-half of the Trump admin and the 2020 election it was old-school liberal/left leaning more than right. Which makes some sense, given who was in charge of the news division and the election desk.
They may have shifted back to more right-wing biases post their ratings drop. Turned out most of the Fox audience wasn’t interested in CNN-lite.
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A quick illustration of how there are still a lot of white racists out there. They just aren’t who we are told are the racists.
https://twitter.com/Locksneedfartin/status/1379519619782864897?s=20
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More.
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Goddamn right!
https://twitter.com/QandLgbt/status/1377672427598184449
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California sure locks up a lot of trannies.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/04/05/261-transgender-prisoners-request-transfer-under-california-law-255-to-womens-prison/
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It’s how you know it’s bad, it’s Double Mutant!
https://redstate.com/bonchie/2021/04/05/media-promote-new-double-mutant-covid-variant-because-everything-is-stupid-n355603
I saw them open for Jonathan Richman in ‘89 and they SUCKED!!!
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Oh no! Not a double mutant!
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What if they don’t want to have sex with a fucking lunatic? Is that bigoted and kookphobic?
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The craziness surrounding reporting on the trans ideological movement is example #1 of the media going off the deep end:
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Have you noticed how much the media loves “gender reveal” gone wrong stories? Anytime anybody sets something on fire or someone gets hurt in some stupid gender-reveal party stunt, the press is all on that story.
Not sure it’s just the “if it bleeds it leads” going on there.
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Sadly, this will work.
https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/digital-marketing/viewpoint-ditch-the-term-vaccine-passport-and-try-these-messaging-strategies-instead.html?origin=BHRE&utm_source=BHRE&utm_medium=email&utm_content=newsletter&oly_enc_id=7410C5524589A6B
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