Brent Nyitray
Fairlington Blade
Let the mutherfuker burn!
jnc4p
Kevin S. Willis
Michigoose
lmsinca
markinaustin
Arcanaut
novahockey
quarterback
ScottC
yellojktVital Statistics:
Stocks are flattish this morning on no real news. Bonds and MBS are up small.
The upcoming week will contain housing data, with the FHFA House Price Data, Case-Shiller, the third revision of first quarter GDP and Personal Incomes / Outlays which will contain the PCE inflation number. Jerome Powell will also speak on Wednesday.
The regional bank crisis has had some effects on the homebuilding sector, according to research from the NAHB. Loans for land acquisition / development and spec single family construction have become more scarce. In multi-family the effect is even more pronounced. Multi-family construction has been hitting on all cylinders and the number of buildings with 5 or more units is at a record.
The regional bank contagion may be a factor in this, however I suspect declining real estate prices are the bigger component. Commercial real estate is particularly problematic, and this is probably the driver.
Jerome Powell’s comments last week pretty much stuck the fork in bets for rate cuts this year. While the comments didn’t impact the July futures all that much, the December futures now predict that the Fed Funds rate at the end of the year will be 25 basis points higher than it is now. Interestingly, they are not predicting the two hikes that the dot plot predicted.
It wasn’t that long ago, that the futures were handicapping a Fed Funds rate around 4.5%. The Fed has instituted a drastic tightening policy, the likes of which we haven’t seen in 40 years. Historically tacking on 500 basis points of tightening would cause a recession, and we simply haven’t seen one yet.
Why haven’t we seen a recession yet? The biggest reason is the labor market, which has remained remarkably resilient. Companies had a difficult time finding workers during the COVID-19 pandemic and are probably reluctant to let them go. Second, companies took advantage of low rates to refinance their existing debt, and now they are paying rates that are pretty much close to the inflation rate. This is the equivalent of free money. And don’t forget the government has been handing out money like candy since COVID began and that spigot will eventually get turned off one way or another.
Filed under: Economy |
All Things in Moderation 
Obviously I’ve changed, I wasn’t nearly cynical enough, and a few years ago I wouldn’t have found this hysterically funny.
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Eh, a fair point. That said, I’ve never thought much of Kerry, who is (like 99% of Democrats and 98% of Republicans, an opportunistic grifter and a narcissist) . . . but now I’m also thinking he, like so many politicians, is too damn old to be doing this crap. Put some younger people in there to be entitled, lie like dogs, and be corrupt and venal while trying to claim they are doing it for “the people”.
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Is this really something to be “proud” of?
https://twitter.com/TPostMillennial/status/1673057359911075840
What exactly is the argument behind the notion that, in order to destigmatize homosexuality, society needs to not just accept but even celebrate public nudity?
Note also the group in the background, following these loons: “Leather Pride.” Why in the world would the average gay person want themselves to be associated in the public mind with all these sexual fetishists?
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Men. Those are men showing their penises. Why that’s suddenly cool and also has to be characterized as some kind of universal thing, and not something dudes are doing
…
Also, yes, the whole point of what’s going on is to put fetishists and pedophiles in the same category as that nice gay couple down the street that has such a lovely yard.
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Mark – how are you doing with the heat wave in Texas?
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JFC.
At least I’m too old for the draft. Sorry Gen Z, you’re fucked.
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Carousel!
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Interesting piece:
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The unremarked upon sophistry and deliberately obfuscating language that permeates this issue drives me crazy. Even the ACLU’s definition of “gender identity”, as relayed by French and which is offered in defense of allowing males to compete against females as long as they claim not to be males, puts the lie to this nonsensical notion that “gender” refers to something other than biological sex.
Gender identity, as the A.C.L.U. defined it, is a “medical term for a person’s ‘deeply felt, inherent sense’ of belonging to a particular sex.”
So then, the thing being “identified”, ie the thing about which a person supposedly has a “deeply felt, inherent sense”, is the person’s own sex. Gender identity means sex identity. The only reason to use the word “gender” is to imply a distinction that can then be rhetorically used at a later point to pretend that the two are entirely different concepts.
That everyone both in the press and in these legal proceedings, even those who are on the right side of the issue, ignores this fact and happily plays along with this obvious linguistic sham is immensely frustrating.
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Well, not sure French and those at the Dispatxh and NR are really part of if the “right” anymore.
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Agreed…no one who gets a gig at the NYT can sensibly be said to be on the right.
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Rockefeller Republicans, one might say.
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Listening to NR podcasts, I would say many under the NR umbrella are of the right—a right that features few Trump-lovers, but few deserving a “strange new respect” from the liberal establishment. But fairly said to be of the right, where Jonah is more establishmentarian all the time, and mostly espousing his own “not left / not right / not libertarian” mix of opinion and sophistry. French strikes me as a liberal evangelical. The kind of religious person for whom every spiritual principal must point every good Christian to the left. But because he believes in God he’s put on the religious right.
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What I thought was interesting was his point that the language for sex and race is virtually identical in the Educational Amendments of 1972 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 but the results have been the opposite vis-a-vis integrated programs when it comes to race vs separate programs when it comes to sex.
I also think his initial question “What is the legal foundation for women’s sports?” is directly downstream from Matt Walsh’s question “What is a woman?”.
If you can’t define woman in the first place, then you can’t have a legal foundation for women’s sports that precludes men participating.
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I don’t consider the ACLU to be an authority on defining medical terms in the first place.
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jnc:
I don’t consider the ACLU to be an authority on defining medical terms in the first place.
Agreed, but a couple of points.
First, despite the ACLU’s claim to the contrary, neither “gender” nor “gender identity” are medical terms in any event.
Second, no one seems to be an authority on what “gender” means. Many organizations that claim to be providing information on the topic quite conspicuously fail to define it at all, and those that do define it inevitably have completely different definitions from each other.
It really is a complete joke, and it is to the judicial system’s lasting discredit that it never seems to matter when it rules on these type of things.
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