Brent Nyitray
Fairlington Blade
Let the mutherfuker burn!
jnc4p
Kevin S. Willis
Michigoose
lmsinca
markinaustin
Memetrics
novahockey
quarterback
ScottC
yellojktVital Statistics:
Stocks are lower as we begin the FOMC meeting. Bonds and MBS are down.
Construction spending rose 0.3% MOM in February, according to Census. This was up 3.8% compared to a year ago. Residential construction spending was down 0.2% MOM and 10% on a YOY basis. It is interesting how much single family and multi-family construction spending has diverged.
Lending Tree is down some 22% this morning after reporting a disappointing quarter. Mortgage revenues were down big, but home equity was a bright spot. Given the home affordability problems as well as the lock-in effect (i.e. hate the house, love the mortgage) we are probably going to see more emphasis on reno products, and HELOCs are another good way to do some business while we wait for rates to fall.
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The number of job openings decreased to 9.6 million, according to the latest JOLTS jobs report. This was down 384,000 from February and 1.6 million from December 31. The quits rate, which tends to predict wage inflation, fell to 2.5%. The quits rate was 2.9% a year ago.
The job openings rates were highest in leisure / hospitality, especially arts and entertainment. I guess the world needs more poets.
Filed under: Economy |
All Things in Moderation 
Oh the irony:
“CDC opens probe after 35 test positive for covid following CDC conference
Experts say that the cases illustrate the persistence of an evolving virus.
By Lena H. Sun and Dan Diamond
Updated May 2, 2023 at 4:15 p.m. EDT”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2023/05/02/covid-outbreak-cdc-annual-conference/
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drew about 2,000 attendees who were likely to be fully vaccinated.
I’d of expected the Covid Litany at a minimum
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Too funny
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More to the point, the soul-searching in which Fauci and other liberals are currently engaged has absolutely no parallel on the right. Conservatives got COVID extremely wrong. Where is the accountability? Where is the course correction? The answer is that they don’t exist, because the conservative movement is incapable of engaging in them.
Donald Trump threatened to fire Dr. Nancy Messonnier, a top CDC official, for telling reporters in February 2020 that the virus would likely spread to the United States. Trump insisted that month that China was “getting it under control more and more, that the United States had just 15 people [with COVID], and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.” He repeated over and over: “Just stay calm. It will go away.” (March 10). “It’s going to go away, hopefully at the end of the month. And, if not, hopefully it will be soon after that.” (March 31). “It is going to go away. It is going away.” (April 3). “I always say, even without it [a vaccine], it goes away.” (June 16). And on and on.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/05/wheres-the-gop-soul-searching-for-getting-covid-wrong.html
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I love how the automatic response to every leftist fuck up is “…but Trump”
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More to the point, the soul-searching in which Fauci and other liberals are currently engaged …
Lol. Leftist gaslighting just never stops.
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The left is desperate to memory hole the fact that they were an army of arrogant, hectoring Karens who largely got everything wrong.
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BTW, Chait, the author of the piece, is a charlatan. Highlighting the “mental pathologies” of the right, he cites Kevin Hasset who, he says, “is now merrily assuring Republicans that defaulting on the national debt would be no big deal.”
If you click on the link that ostensibly substantiates this claim (which I am sure lms didn’t bother to do) you find that it is an out-and-out lie. The article is actually arguing that the amount of debt needed to maintain Democrat spending desires is unsustainable, and that therefore the R’s are correct in insisting on any increase in the debt ceiling being dependent on spending cuts. At no point does he dismiss the possibility of defaulting on the debt as “no big deal”, and indeed he implies the opposite in that he is arguing that to continue to spend, and issue debt, as the Biden admin wants to do is an even bigger deal. Hasset writes:
We won’t be able to continue to spend like drunken sailors if Congress fails to lift the debt limit. When we hit the current debt limit in August, it will be necessary for Congress to vote to lift it. Traditionally, politicians have caved because they have been worried about the reputational risk inherent in the United States’ failing to make interest payments and defaulting on its debt. But, if we are already set to out-borrow Weimar Germany and head for ruin, as the numbers clearly indicate, what’s the added harm from that risk?
Note the if-then context and the phrase “added harm”. Chait ignores both in order to make his dishonest claim. He is a liar. And this is the kind of writer that lms relies on to inform her?
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Chiat is a dingleberry
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I’m pretty sure Chait is one or two columns away from again saying that Trump is the safe choice on the Republican side.
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There’s also the fact that the MSM uses “defaulting on the national debt” in a much broader sense than is actually warranted.
Not all government obligations are the equivalent of issued Treasury debt. They have no problem making this distinction with countries like Greece when discussing the issue of debt default.
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Chait to me fundamentally discredited himself by taking Russiagate to 11 and declaring that Trump has been a Soviet/Russian asset since 1987.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/07/trump-putin-russia-collusion.html
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“Conservatives aren’t contemplating, let alone engaging in, soul-searching over their incompetent dismissal of COVID’s risk, or embrace of quack cures, or vaccine skepticism.”
I think the information that’s come out recently has actually fed the skepticism. Chait’s list of Republican statements and how they are wrong is all well and good, but despite his claims, there hasn’t been a reckoning on the Democratic side with the vast majority of their errors, starting with saying that they wouldn’t trust any “Trump vaccine”, to claiming that it was fine to march in BLM demonstrations because racism was a bigger health risk than COVID to trying to allocate vaccines based on “equity” considerations.
It’s much more extensive than this:
As recently as last year you had Novak Djokovic being banned from the US Open over an absurd vaccine mandate even though he had natural immunity from a previous bout of COVID. And of course now the fact that natural immunity is as good as the vaccine is finally acknowledged, which “vaccine deniers” had been claiming the whole time.
It was much less about the “science” and more about all knees shall bend.
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The left runs the administrative state, and therefore runs the government. The president is nominally in charge, but really has all the responsibility and none of the authority.
About the only Republican that did something notable was DeSantis in refusing to close schools and businesses for fun. And he turned out to be right.
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Like DeSantis, but the schools did close for a period. I believe though that Florida was the first state to reopen.
And to LMS’s point, Trump, by asking for a two week shut down and deferring to Fauci and Birx was, we all agree, the worst Presidential decision since invading Iraq the second time.
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Very not good.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/kremlin-says-putin-survived-overnight-114602738.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly9jaXRpemVuZnJlZXByZXNzLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAErkARvZsLlNnq19DgaXn-NLqp56oFEFb3pScWU0w0xUhJovptBoAhiRpl6c4KEE9DS9dcOMmwgI4eqh8ILukDdV7s1hAYg-CYV77Wu8IAi_qoRKefls0yBH3r570iwNqbTPSf2Lme0JsVXz_DEziVkaNb0l5FlGdA5kpOWjerRL
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