Brent Nyitray
Fairlington Blade
Let the mutherfuker burn!
jnc4p
Kevin S. Willis
Michigoose
lmsinca
markinaustin
Memetrics
novahockey
quarterback
ScottC
yellojktVital Statistics:
Stocks are higher this morning on no real news. Bonds and MBS are flat.
Consumer sentiment slipped in May, according to the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Survey. This is down 9.1% from April. Consumer expectations fell 11% despite a strong labor market. Inflationary expectations for the near term fell, while longer-term expectations rose to 3.2%, the highest level in 12 years.
We know the Fed pays close attention to the UM inflationary expectations, so this is bad news for those hoping for rate cuts this year.
Mortgage delinquency rates fell 3.56% in the first quarter, according to the MBA. This is down 40 basis points from the fourth quarter and 55 basis points from a year ago.
“The mortgage delinquency rate fell to its lowest level for any first quarter since MBA’s survey began in 1979 and was the second lowest quarterly rate overall, just 11 basis points above the survey low in the third quarter of 2022,” said Marina Walsh, CMB, MBA’s Vice President of Industry Analysis. “Mortgage delinquencies and the unemployment rate continue to track each other closely, with the unemployment rate in April falling back to the 54-year low of 3.4 percent set in January. Consistent with the resilient job market, the performance of existing mortgages is exceeding expectations. Across all states, there was an improvement in the first quarter compared to one year ago. Year-over-year delinquencies for all product types – FHA, VA, and conventional – were also down.”
Unemployment and delinquencies correlate pretty tightly:
Fed Governor Michelle Bowman spoke in Germany this morning. Here are her prepared remarks. Her comments were pretty hawkish on monetary policy, and nothing remote suggests rate cuts are coming in the near future, though the Fed Funds futures see cuts as imminent.
In my view, our policy stance is now restrictive, but whether it is sufficiently restrictive to bring inflation down remains uncertain. Some signs of slowing in aggregate demand, lower numbers of job openings and more modest gross domestic product (GDP) growth indicate that we have moved into restrictive territory. But inflation remains much too high, and measures of core inflation have remained persistently elevated, with declining unemployment and ongoing wage growth. And, as senior loan officers signaled beginning last summer, credit has continued to tighten.2 I expect this trend will continue given increased bank funding costs and reduced levels of liquidity.
Should inflation remain high and the labor market remain tight, additional monetary policy tightening will likely be appropriate to attain a sufficiently restrictive stance of monetary policy to lower inflation over time. I also expect that our policy rate will need to remain sufficiently restrictive for some time to bring inflation down and create conditions that will support a sustainably strong labor market.
Filed under: Economy |
All Things in Moderation 
Please say some prayers for our DailyKos brethren as they process and cope what happened Wednesday night.
https://www.dailykos.com/search?text=CNN&time_begin=05%2F05%2F2023&time_end=now&text_type=any&text_expand=contains&search_type=search_stories&time_type=time_published&submit=search
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It would take a heart of stone not to laugh.
Adidas has about 1.2bn euros (£1bn; $1.3bn) worth of Yeezy shoes sitting in storage.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65562286
Wonder if anybody lost their job over it.
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to put that number into perspective, Adidas earned $600MM over the past 12 months.
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It’s remarkable. Wonder what will happen with the shareholder lawsuit.
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German company. Shareholders don’t mattter
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Concise summation on the changing Democratic position on “merit”.
https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/the-democrats-merit-problem
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It is just marxism gussied up with new labeling. Democrats have never abandoned the concept.
They live in a world of what ought to be true instead of what is true.
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Brent:
It is just marxism gussied up with new labeling.
This is exactly right. The key to understanding what motivates the policies of the modern Democratic Party is knowing that it has been captured by the radical, Marxist left. Once you understand that, everything the Dems embrace, from BLM to CRT to the trans nonsense to open borders, makes sense.
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Not precisely. The identity politics that are grafted on are something separate from classical Marxism. It drives real Marxists batty because it interferes with the old class consciousness arguments.
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I think the left struck out trying to sell the concept using class so they are giving identity a go.
If everything in life is a function of privilege and oppression based on identity, than success is nothing more than an accident of birth.
And equity is the lever to even everything out.
The current left understands that a command economy cannot work. So they use ESG ratings to conscript the private sector into doing their bidding.
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Brent:
I think the left struck out trying to sell the concept using class so they are giving identity a go.
Yep…this is precisely what is going on. It is no mere coincidence that all of the ideas being pushed via the DEI and ESG movement have their intellectual grounding in the Marxism departments of academia.
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jnc:
The identity politics that are grafted on are something separate from classical Marxism.
It isn’t separate. It is simply an extension of it, or an updated version, like DOS 1.0 and DOS 2.0
The underlying premise of Marxism is that various groups in society have competing group interests, and that these interests drive both the societal creation of hierarchies among and conflict between the groups. For Marxism 1.0, the groups were defined by economics, ie class, but recall that a basic tenet of Marxism 1.0 was that capitalist societies would produce their own collapse when it impoverished the proletariat, leading to rebellion against and destruction of the hierarchies of the state. The problem for Marxism 1.0, however, was that capitalism did exactly the opposite. It provided wealth and comfort for the proletariat, leading them to buy into capitalist society and its hierarchies rather than rebel against it/them. So if this destruction of the state and its hierarchies was ever going to happen, the relevant identity groups needed to be recast. A large part of the Marxist project in the academy in the 1960s and 70s was aimed at doing this recasting, producing Marxism 2.0, which differs primarily in that the hierarchies are supposedly established by racial and gender identities rather than economic class identities. Hence the constant claims of “structural” racism and discrimination. Just as economic oppression was supposedly an unavoidable aspect of capitalist societies, so too now racial and sexual “oppression” are also claimed to be “structural” aspects of society. And the goal in both cases was/is the overthrow and destruction of this “oppressive” system by the oppressed.
And that is exactly what we are witnessing the left attempting to do..create the conditions in which this destruction will come about. It isn’t a separate Marxism. It is just an updated version of the same old Marxist theology applied to new identity groups. Whether the Dems are knowingly participating or simply new versions of Lenin’s useful idiots, I don’t know (probably a bit of both), but they are certainly enabling it.
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Lol!
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/hunter-biden-ex-wife-kathleen-buhles-divorce-attorneys-were-aware-romania-deal-payments
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The Biden’s have perfected replacing current corrupt foreign officials with corrupt foreign officials they prefer. See Ukraine.
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It was a nice two step. Joe announces the crack down and a few months later the checks start flowing to Hunter.
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What’s your take on this Brent & Scott?
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My guess is the price improvement will be negligible at best. Maybe a couple hundreds of a cent. In an environment of zero cost commissions, I don’t know how someone like Robinhood can stay in business
At the end of the day, if you want to have broker-dealers, they have to earn revenue somehow. Commissions, payment for order flow, or bid-ask spreads.
People forget that 30 years ago, stocks traded in 1/8ths, and the institutional rate was a nickel a share commission.
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Interesting piece. I didn’t know that the whole hostile working environment lawsuit against Carlson was based on this:
Also, this is a perfect turn of phrase: “power-victim portrait”.
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total setup
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Why repudiation will occur sooner rather than later.
Things go on until they can’t. When there’s no more room in the budget to hand out funds, we’ll just shed the debt.
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Japan has been a basket case for the past 20 years and they still have the lowest interest rates in the world
Their debt to gdp ratio is 2.3x. We are something like 1.3, and a bunch of that is owned by the Fed, so that number gets an asterisk next to it.
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I guess “Juicy Smolier” was right, Chicago is MAGA country.
https://redstate.com/bonchie/2023/05/12/watch-chicago-democrats-sound-an-awful-lot-like-white-supremacists-at-rally-opposing-illegal-immigrants-n744927
“I hate Illinois Nazis”!
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That French actor?
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To me, these dudes are obviously feds.
https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2023/05/14/watch-patriot-front-guys-appear-again-mockery-ensues-n745771
But, if they’re not all feds than the non feds in the groups are horrifically stupid considering how completely penetrated such groups have been in the past. Consider the Oathkeepers or Proudboys are, in the latest proud boys trial it was established that there were at least 48 feds and or informants with the group on Jan 6, which I’m guessing was at least 25-50% of their entire presence there.
I find this whole thing hilarious.
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