Vital Statistics:
Last | Change | |
S&P futures | 4,006 | -3.75 |
Oil (WTI) | 78.12 | -2.83 |
10 year government bond yield | 3.74% | |
30 year fixed rate mortgage | 6.59% |
Stocks are flattish this morning on no real news. Bonds and MBS are up small.
The big event today will the the FOMC minutes at 2:00 pm today. Investors will be looking for clues that the Fed is ready to pivot to a less hawkish monetary policy. The consensus seems to be that we will get a 50 basis point hike in December and then another 50 sometime in 2023.
The yield curve continues to invert, with the 2s 10s spread now at 80 basis points. This sort of inversion was last seen in the early 1980s which was during a pretty major recession.

With the Fed Funds target rate at 3.75% – 4.00%, the 10 year is below the overnight rate, and the 30 year is almost there.
The decline in long-term rates is helping the mortgage market, which had its second straight increase in weekly applications. The composite index rose 2.2% as purchases increased 3% and refis increased 2%. “The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage fell for the second week in a row to 6.67 percent and is now down almost 50 basis points from the recent peak of 7.16 percent one month ago,” said Joel Kan, MBA Vice President and Deputy Chief Economist. “The decrease in mortgage rates should improve the purchasing power of prospective homebuyers, who have been largely sidelined as mortgage rates have more than doubled in the past year. As a result of the drop in mortgage rates, both purchase and refinance applications picked up slightly last week. However, refinance activity is still more than 80 percent below last year’s pace.”
Consumer sentiment declined in November, according to the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index. Sentiment was weighed down by rising interest rates, a weakening labor market, and continued inflation. That said, inflationary expectations for the next year ticked down to 4.9% from 5.0%, although longer-term expectations remained in the 2.9% – 3.1% range. The last time expectations were this high 2008 and the early 1980s.

New Home sales rose 7.5% MOM in October to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 632,000. This is still down about 5.8% on a YOY basis. The median price was up 24% YOY to 493,000.
Filed under: Economy |
NY Times today:
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the global population will probably peak at 10 billion since families are getting smaller and the growth rate was exaggerated over the past 50 years by declining infant mortality rates.
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“Poor countries that are heavily populated, such as India, contribute relatively little per capita to the greenhouse gas emissions that are heating the planet”
I have a hard time believing that. I’m not sure they are measuring that correctly. They need to show their work.
“As the human population doubled in the last half century, wildlife populations declined by 70 percent.”
Again, I want to see the numbers. Who is measuring all the wildlife. Who measure it back in 1972, and how, so we we’ve lost 70% of it (that number is insane—we’ve lost 70% of the planet’s wildlife from 1972 to now?
“We’re already using nearly twice as many resources as the Earth can replenish in a year.”
How do they come up with that number? Or does it just fit the narrative so don’t think about it.
“ One of the most effective ways to combat global warming, say both climate activists and those concerned about overpopulation, is to expand access to education for girls around the world”
So basically here are scare numbers, don’t worry about where they came from, and the solution is education for girls that we should pay for and also more abortions which we should pay for.
“and opposing what he calls reproductive fascism”
Is there anything that isn’t fascism to these people?
““Look what we did to this planet,” Mr. Knight said during a chat in his sunlit backyard one warm morning this fall. “We’re not a good species.””
What did we do to the planet? A huge amount of it remains largely untouched, and a lot of what is touched is pretty nice. I don’t think we’re any worse than any other species. Judgmental prick.
“ growing up in a tolerant family in Oregon, Mr. Knight watched timber companies chop down the state’s forests”
Really. They chopped down all the forests. In Oregon.
““I don’t think the whales will miss our songs.””
I don’t not care what whales think. At all. Not saying I want to see them hunted to extinction but I also don’t see the argument for letting the human race die out because whales don’t appreciate our music.
“he likes to think there are some humans who don’t exist because of his efforts.”
Which gives him a little thrill, I’m taking it. Which may explain his motivations better than saving the planet.
The older I get the moral all this stuff feels like LARPing.
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“ One of the most effective ways to combat global warming, say both climate activists and those concerned about overpopulation, is to expand access to education for girls around the world”
World ends tomorrow. Women most affected.
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Yup. And they just drop that there, context-free. The context being that in America, boys are suffering more on standardized tests than girls, and now more women get college degrees than men. How is that elided when they also state America is like the worst when it comes to climate change.
Also no mention of the only place where America was making a difference globally in girl’s education: Afghanistan. Where we just pulled out entirely, and all the girls that were going to school there no longer are, and likely never will again.
Just terrible writing/journalism to assert that the biggest bang for our buck in the fight against climate change is educating girls worldwide, and not mention that girls are now more educated that boys in the US and that we deserted the one place where, without the US, and entire country of women will get no education—or no more education, depending on their age.
I should not be surprised that the writers for the most august newspapers write like opinionated high schoolers that have never traveled outside their hometown … but Jeeze.
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Not to mention the student loan bailout. The majority of student loan debt is held by women.
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Looks like the media and the democrats jumped the gun on the colorado springs shooting narrative
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Of course they did. That said they shifted pretty seamlessly from “this was a right wing MAGA mass murderer” to “this was a guy driven to such desperate acts because of how he’d been abuse by right wing MAGA types”.
Basically, conservatives caused it no matter if the guy is a MEGA-MAGA or an Antifa. As it can’t just be the person who committed the crime’s fault.
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It is an excuse to censor social media. That is all it is.
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Worth noting:
“Vaccinated people now make up a majority of covid deaths
Analysis by McKenzie Beard
November 23, 2022 at 7:46 a.m. EST”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/23/vaccinated-people-now-make-up-majority-covid-deaths/
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Trust the experts – they never get it wrong
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“Trust the experts – they never get it wrong”
Or always get it wrong. There’s a point where experts become so arrogant about their own expertise they believe because they think a thing, that makes it true. Much more likely to be wrong than right with that orientation.
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The food pyramid – because LBJ wanted to “do something” – became official policy and one of its core beliefs was that dietary fat makes you fat. So basically, the pyramid argued that you should eat very little meat, and the mainstay of your diet should be starch and vegetables.
You were supposed to have 4 or 5 servings of starch per day. Nowadays, i think most nutritionists would recommend 1 or 2. I mean, we all know the downside of carbs, right.
This was based on the science at the time (it wasn’t big AG – Japanese, German, Chinese etc all thought the same thing.
But it was wrong.
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Everything we think we know to be true is probably wrong.
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Happy Thanksgiving, y’all.
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Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family, Mark!
Happy Thanksgiving to everyone! LMS, if you’re around, Happy Thanksgiving to you, Walter and your family!
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Thanks…and you too!
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Not everything. But I do believe a non-trivial amount of what we just “know” to be true is not.
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Happy Thanksgiving to you too Mark & everyone else here.
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It’s always been a mediocre Tamiflu with underreported side effects.
We’ll be spending years unknotting the purposefully obscured information.
What’s at the bottom? Altruism? Money? Politics? What if HRC had been POTUS, would the pandemic have been as, er, publicized as it was?
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What’s at the bottom?
Having the ability to make the troglodytes do what you tell them. This is like unlimited hookers and blow for these people.
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Money for the big Pharma companies, dictatorial power and outsized prominence for Fauci. And of course Fauci got to push his monomaniacal obsession with prevention and his hatred of treatment. He’s always been destructively preoccupied with preventing disease, to the point where we would rather prevent people from accessing effective treatments. All the current treatments regimens for AIDS were advanced in opposition to Fauci—he only want to focus on a vaccine-style cure.
A lot of people enjoyed the emergency element. This was their WWII, vaccine their scrap metal drives, and they reacted to the unvaccinated the way Americans in 1942 would have reacted to people saying they wanted the Japs to win.
It was just a perfect storm to inspire a kind of mass hysteria. All sorts of people were getting something out of it. Money for some, power for others, a sense of specialness or moral superiority for still others. And of course a lot of people just didn’t want to work, or wanted to work from home in their pajamas.
As far as would it have been as big a deal under HRC? 100%. A lot of the folks driving to COVID panic had been trying to get this hysteria started for H1N1, Zika, Ebola and a few others, I think, where the disease just wouldn’t cooperate and kill more people. And the same battles about vaxxing could have potentially been had—although I think it might have been an additional year or more before we got the vax. HRC would have been the heroic president we needed in this time of pandemic, narrative-wise. But I think the hysteria would have been largely the same.
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Vaccinated folks or people who’ve already had COVID probably make up 99% of COVID deaths at this point.
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Amusing:
“Jan. 6 panel staffers angry at Cheney for focusing so much of report on Trump”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/23/liz-cheney-jan-6-committee/
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I find it amusing this is still going on..
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Interesting comment is a longer set of comments about the WAPO article on how J6 Committer staffers are butthurt over Liz Cheney.
DeathBySalad
lpeacock
Nov 24, 2022 at 01:05:15 PM
And never forget that Cheney and Kinzinger are very conservative Republicans, by their voting records. They’re opposed to Der Trumpenführer, because he’s interfering with the normal activities of the Republican Party, which is all about making sure the wealthy and privileged don’t suffer the terrible privation of having a few less millions in their offshore accounts.
Does the author of the comment think that Trump’s normal activities were the opposite?
https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2022/11/24/2138109/-Abbreviated-Pundit-Roundup-Some-Turkey-Day-thinkpieces#comment_85040507
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I’m pretty sure this was in Revelations.
“‘Opening the gates of hell’: Musk says he will revive banned accounts
The Twitter chief says he will reinstate accounts suspended for threats, harassment and misinformation beginning next week
By Taylor Lorenz
Updated November 24, 2022 at 6:14 p.m. EST|”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/24/twitter-musk-reverses-suspensions/
“And I looked, and behold a pale tweet: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”
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Fuck her. She has no business complaining about doxxing and dogpiling.
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Lorenz if kind of clearly a terrible person. Why WaPo still employs her is beyond me.
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KW:
Lorenz if kind of clearly a terrible person. Why WaPo still employs her is beyond me.
Probably because the WaPo is owned, managed, and populated largely by people who identify perfectly with her terribleness.
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