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yellojktVital Statistics:
| Last | Change | |
| S&P futures | 4,130 | -9.50 |
| Oil (WTI) | 80.20 | 4.54 |
| 10 year government bond yield | 3.51% | |
| 30 year fixed rate mortgage | 6.40% |
Stocks are lower this morning after OPEC voted to restrict production over the weekend. Bonds and MBS are down.
The jobs report on Friday will be the big event for the week, along with the ISM data. The bond market will close early on Friday.
FHFA is making the COVID-era six month deferral permanent, allowing borrowers to skip up to six monthly payments and then tack them on to the end of the mortgage. “The Enterprises completed more than one million COVID-19 payment deferrals during the pandemic, helping borrowers nationwide to stay in their homes,” said FHFA Director Sandra L. Thompson. “Based on the success of the COVID-19 payment deferral, we are making this solution a key part of our standard loss mitigation toolkit that is available to all borrowers with eligible hardships.”
More evidence that the bank deposit run of a few weeks ago is abating. Raymond James points out that smaller banks are gaining deposits. Overall, deposits did fall, but they came out of the larger banks and the foreign-domiciled ones. “Essentially, the liquidity crisis, if it even was one outside a handful of banks, appears to be easing, which should be good news for banks and financials, which were the worst performing sector in Q1,” the strategist wrote. “It makes very little sense we would have a broad liquidity crisis in the banking system when there is so much excess liquidity (cash) sloshing around,” he said.
The manufacturing economy contracted in March, according to the ISM Manufacturing Survey. “The U.S. manufacturing sector contracted again, with the Manufacturing PMI® declining compared to the previous month. With Business Survey Committee panelists reporting softening new order rates over the previous 10 months, the March composite index reading reflects companies continuing to slow outputs to better match demand for the first half of 2023 and prepare for growth in the late summer/early fall period. New order rates remain sluggish as panelists become more concerned about when manufacturing growth will resume. Supply chains are now ready for growth, as panelists’ comments support reduced lead times for their more important purchases. Price instability remains, but future demand is uncertain as companies continue to work down overdue deliveries and backlogs. Seventy percent of manufacturing gross domestic product (GDP) is contracting, down from 82 percent in February.”
My weekly Substack piece focuses on the Greenspan Put and if it will make a re-appearance with the banking instability. Check it out and please consider subscribing.
Filed under: Economy |
All Things in Moderation 
The Post Op-Ed goes all in today and Tom Hanks joins.
1876 election rigging, Reconstruction and the KKK.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions
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At its peak, the Klan claimed four U.S. senators as sworn members, and dozens under its control in the House of Representatives.
Oddly, he fails to inform his audience of the political party to which they all belonged.
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Scott, apparently you forgot that the parties switched platforms along the way. Isn’t that pretty common knowledge?
After the United States triumphed over the Confederate States at the end of the Civil War, and under President Abraham Lincoln, Republicans passed laws that granted protections for Black Americans and advanced social justice (for example the Civil Rights Act of 1866 (opens in new tab) though this failed to end slavery). Again Democrats largely opposed these apparent expansions of federal power.
Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt won reelection that year on the strength of the New Deal. This was a set of reforms designed to help remedy the effects of the Great Depression, which the FDR Presidential Library and Museum (opens in new tab) described as: “a severe, world -wide economic disintegration symbolized in the United States by the stock market crash on “Black Thursday,” October 24, 1929.” The reforms included regulation of financial institutions, the founding of welfare and pension programs, infrastructure development and more. It was these measures that ensured Roosevelt won in a landslide against Republican Alf Landon, who opposed these exercises of federal power.
So, sometime between the 1860s and 1936, the (Democratic) party of small government became the party of big government, and the (Republican) party of big government became rhetorically committed to curbing federal power.
Democrats seized upon a way of ingratiating themselves to western voters: Republican federal expansions in the 1860s and 1870s had turned out favorable to big businesses based in the northeast, such as banks, railroads and manufacturers, while small-time farmers like those who had gone west received very little.
Both parties tried to exploit the discontent this generated, by promising the general public some of the federal help that had previously gone to the business sector. From this point on, Democrats stuck with this stance — favoring federally funded social programs and benefits — while Republicans were gradually driven to the counterposition of hands-off government.
From a business perspective, Rauchway pointed out, the loyalties of the parties did not really switch. “Although the rhetoric and to a degree the policies of the parties do switch places,” he wrote, “their core supporters don’t — which is to say, the Republicans remain, throughout, the party of bigger businesses; it’s just that in the earlier era bigger businesses want bigger government and in the later era they don’t.”
https://www.livescience.com/34241-democratic-republican-parties-switch-platforms.html
From Vox
In the midcentury South, the organized political expression of white supremacist politics was the Democratic Party. Indeed, number of prominent Democratic politicians — including Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd, Supreme Court justice and Senator Hugo Black, and Mississippi governor and Senator Theodore Bilbo — were members of the Klan. But in the course of the 1960s, the northern wing of the Democrats joined with Republican elected officials (almost all of them northern) to pass the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.
After that, southern presidential politics rapidly re-aligned with newly enfranchised black voters supporting Democrats and most whites voting for GOP candidates. If the Klan was successful in suppressing African-American turnout or in pulling white people into the electoral process, that would boost the fortunes of Republican candidates.
And at least in some cases, the Klan actively supported Republican candidates. “Certainly, generating support for specific Republican presidential candidates or the Republican Party in general was not a primary goal of the Klan,” the authors write, but “while the Klan was perhaps best known for its violent tactics in the 1960s, the movement did invest significant energy in attempting to influence voting outcomes … Klan members advocated for Goldwater’s Republican candidacy in 1964 while incessantly criticizing Democratic incumbents’ intensifying support for civil rights.”
https://www.vox.com/2014/12/10/7372495/ku-klux-klan-republican
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I have always considered the left’s narrative on that subject too pat and self-serving.
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I’ve always considered it counter-factual. Or a rewriting of history.
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Both parties have had shifting platforms. Although I would argue the Democrats intrinsic bigotry against minorities has changed in its manifestation and justification, though not its condescension, but not the fact of it.
A more apparent swapping of platforms has clearly happened, IMO, since the 1990s. The Democrats and Republicans have swapped their working man and blue collar positions, where the Democrats now almost exclusively support the boutique concerns of the elite classes and the Republicans are much more likely to speak to working class issues (even if they aren’t very active in actually addressing them).
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That tends to omit that a large number of Republican incumbents led the civil rights charge and, if I recall, more Republicans voted for it than Democrats? Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.
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KW:
Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.
You aren’t wrong. It’s progressive grasp of history that is wrong.
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lms:
Scott, apparently you forgot that the parties switched platforms along the way.
No they didn’t. At no point did the Republican Party platform endorse slavery or racism, even after the Dems finally stopped doing so. You are mistaken.
Isn’t that pretty common knowledge?
Sometimes there is just no accounting for what progressives consider “common knowledge”. I am reminded of what the great Ronald Reagan said back in the 1980s: …”It isn’t so much that liberals are ignorant. It’s just that they know so many things that aren’t so.” The more things change, the more they remain the same.
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I think this is what the Post’s recent focus on the issue is really about:
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The goal is to force people to choose between being a Klansman or supporting every whim of the LBGTQ movement?
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That people are still afraid of being labeled a racist/bigot/homophobe/transphobe, in this day and age, given the left’s penchant for accusing everybody of these things, amazes me.
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Given the left’s control of most cultural institutions, and the number of people who are unaware of that fact, there are still real consequences of being so labelled. It don’t think it is simply a case of sticks and stones. So I get why some people still go out of their way to avoid getting so labelled. But I agree that we do need more courage on this front.
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which is why the left is so hot to ban tik tok, which opens the door to them banning Rumble, Truth Social, and any other platform they don’t control.
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It also is supported by competition from Meta and Alphabet who donate lavishly to them. Both would love to get TikTok out of the American marketplace. And replace them. With the same shit.
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Good read.
https://popehat.substack.com/p/berating-the-bumptious-whittier-colleges
Mark, you should read the letter that Ken White sent back. It’s a work of art:
Click to access 2022-12-29_e-robison-attorney-response-to-cease-and-desist-from-whittier-college.pdf
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Best line:
“No serious lawyer or modestly successful middle-school civics student would say otherwise.”
I am going to have to remember that one. It applies to much of what is going on these days.
Pelosi…”No one is above the law, and everyone has the right to a trial to prove innocence.”
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This is also classic:
“I don’t know whether President Oubré and the Board of Trustees are getting bad legal advice, whether they are emotionally or intellectually impervious to good legal advice, or whether their sense of entitlement not to be criticized has outweighed the legal advice.”
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Absolutely delightful. Thanks, Joe.
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So did Trump.
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In all seriousness, is there any part of the electorate that believes this is not politically motivated?
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/live-blog/trump-indictment-live-updates-rcna77703#rcrd12101
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The Hive Mind believes it is not.
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If you consider Kos as part of the Hive mind then they are actively praying that Bragg, Willis and Smith are coordinating, which is out and our political coordinating. Not only do they think it is, they want it to be seen as such.
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The Hive Mind is utopian. They don’t care. By any means necessary.
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I think it’s obvious political, and approaching despotism. That said it doesn’t make me want to vote for Trump, but against those people. I will be voting for someone not Trump in the primary, though.
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Look, I feel for people who lose their job, I’ve lost several myself. That said, the leadership of ActBlue not living up to progressive values is amusing to me. Not shocking, mind you, but amusing. That everyone’s ultra conservative regarding their own income is the ultimate indictment of Progressive Values.
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Fuck it, it’s only money.
https://www.forces.net/ukraine/us-expected-announce-26bn-fresh-round-military-aid-ukraine
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This is seeming more like another money hole to funnel money to corrupt cronies, somehow.
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Buy some defense stocks.
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Men are awesome!
https://twitter.com/olilondontv/status/1642335748627091457?s=46&t=vSGsUlnc4rLxcUf7zfUiHg
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It’s the new and socially acceptable way to be a sexist piece of shit. Just pretend you’re a woman and you can be as reductively sexist as you want!
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KW:
Just pretend you’re a woman and you can be as reductively sexist as you want!
It’s just a sexist version of blackface…someone doing a caricatured imitation of a woman. And the left is all in on it. But no doubt it is “common knowledge” among progressives that it is the right that perpetuates sexist stereotypes.
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Which is why 30 or 50 years from now when the whole culture reviles the sexist, anti-woman trans stuff it will be characterized as a manifestation of right wing chauvinism. “The right is always on the wrong side of history with their bigotry!”
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I’ve been waiting for this to happen:
https://twitter.com/AlisonMKilgour/status/1642884148770623490?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1642884148770623490%7Ctwgr%5E3b0ed4e138ebb0dc92723ec57917cfc0312425e1%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailywire.com%2Fnews%2Fdrag-queens-lead-govt-funded-junior-drag-camp-for-kids-as-young-as-7-years-old
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One gets the feeling there are those who just want to invade and ruin every space women have carved out for themselves, while there are others who just want to deconstruct society as a whole.
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