Brent Nyitray
Fairlington Blade
Let the mutherfuker burn!
jnc4p
Kevin S. Willis
Michigoose
lmsinca
markinaustin
Arcanaut
novahockey
quarterback
ScottC
yellojktVital Statistics:
Stocks are lower as the Fed begins its FOMC meeting. Bonds and MBS are up.
Retail sales rose 0.7% MOM in November, which was above expectations. On a year-over-year basis, they rose 3.8%. Motor Vehicles and parts were the big driver of the increase. Excluding vehicles and gas, sales rose 0.2% MOM, which was below expectations. October’s sales numbers were revised upward.
The S&P Flash PMI hit a 33 month high in December. Output rose at the steepest rate in 33 months, and much of the increase was attributed to the incoming administration. That said, the growth was concentrated in the service sector, as manufacturing conditions continued to deteriorate.
“Business is booming in the US services economy, where output is growing at the sharpest rate since the reopening of the economy from COVID lockdowns in 2021. The service sector expansion is helping drive overall growth in the economy to its fastest for nearly three years, consistent with GDP rising at an annualized rate of just over 3% in December.
“It’s a different picture in manufacturing, however, where output is falling sharply and at an increased rate, in part due to weak export demand. Encouragingly, confidence in the 12-month outlook has lifted to a two-and-a-half year high, suggesting the robust economic upturn will persist into the new year and could also become more broad-based by sector. However, some of the high spirits seen after the election in the manufacturing sector have been checked over concerns surrounding tariffs and the potential impact on inflation resulting from the higher cost of imported materials. December saw raw material prices spike sharply higher amid supplier-led price rises and higher shipping costs, in a reflection of busier supply chains in advance of threatened protectionism in the new year.”
Notably, the PMI and the CPI are diverging, and since the PMI generally leads the CPI, we should see further downward pressure on inflation, which is good for the Fed as it fights the last mile of inflation.
Industrial production fell 0.1% MOM in November, according to the Federal Reserve. Manufacturing production rose 0.2%. Capacity Utilization slipped to 76.8%. Note that October’s numbers were revised downward.
Filed under: Economy |
All Things in Moderation 
Good read. Crazy this is the state of affairs given the size of the military budget.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/12/weapons-production-munitions-shortfall-ukraine-democracy/680867/
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Aren’t we just giving Ukraine our old shit? I thought the whole point of the exercise was to update our weapons.
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Apparently not.
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So where is the money going? I don’t subscribe to the Atlantic
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Brent….you can read it at this link:
https://archive.ph/2iRS9
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jnc:
Crazy this is the state of affairs given the size of the military budget.
Crazy, and yet entirely understandable given the priorities of the party that has been in charge of it for the last 4 years.
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Sure, you’d just have to fire half the people in the DoD.
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I’m shocked Senate Republicans got rolled.
https://redstate.com/terichristoph/2024/12/17/keep-an-eye-on-this-lefty-judges-are-unretiring-in-desperate-attempt-to-thwart-trumps-agenda-n2183325
Next you’ll tell me the CR is full of pork and things to tie Trump’s hands.
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So far he doesn’t seem to have a strategy for the obstructionism in the senate. Hope his team figures something out.
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Still think Cenk’s on the grift.
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I think he’s reasonably sincere. Doesn’t mean he’s not a lefty and his definition of corruption might be overly expansive for conservatives. Love the lefty responses: you can’t partner with people who tried to overthrow the government!
Yes because everyone on the right tried to overthrow the government on Jan 6th but then just gave up despite apparently being a majority and certainly owning a majority of guns.
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That said, if he’s serious he’s going to get fully red-pilled. He will be fighting corrupt leftists left and right moving heaven and earth to protect their corrupt enterprises. And realize that most on the left are no more serious about their stated goals than establishment Republicans.
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I don’t trust his pivot at all
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Maybe. Feel weirdly sincere in some ways because he still hates Dave Rubin so much but that also might indicate it’s a grift. In any case I fundamentally agree with a lot of what he is saying about listening to ideas, talking to people across the aisle, and pursuing goals over ideologically purity.
In any case I don’t think he’s the flavor of convert MAGA needs to worry about. Most of those are in the senate. And Republicans already. Eh, time will tell.
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So drones. My mom saw one over her house last night. She said it was about the size of a small car so these aren’t your mail order ones. And this is in Virginia.
And the governor claims to have no knowledge.
https://www.wtvr.com/news/local-news/youngkin-warner-voice-drone-concerns-dec-16-2024
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One flew over my house last night.
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I suspect it’s all tied to the plans about preventing civil unrest during the transition.
Even though there probably won’t be any, they still have budget to spend.
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It’s funny that one governor that is willing to go on the record is Larry Hogan.
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Wonder what this could be patterned after?
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/12/eating-disorder-content-x/681036/
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Never forget that the left fled X not because it was censoring their speech – they left because X wouldn’t censor other people.
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Read today that their engagement is dropping like a stone.
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X is?
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No, the new lefty haven called Bluesky. Going the way of Threads.
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They wish. Threads has ten times the engagements of Bluesky. Also I find Bluesky quite usable while Threads like if AOL made Twitter in 1992. But Threads is doing much better than Bluesky.
They aren’t ever going to get the normies on Bluesky. The highly partisan and activists constantly forget that a large part of the audience, the users, the electorate—-they are normies. And you don’t cater to them with activism. They’ll get bored and start watching videos of people cooking and unboxing stuff and doing yard work on TikTok.
Threads has normies on it. A lot of the activist left it to return to Twitter/X.
X has normies. Activists focus on MAGA but X is full of casual people for whom politics is 5% of their lives, not 95%.
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The funny thing is that Twitter still seems to be dominated by the left. If there is some sort of MAGA drift, as the left constantly claims, I am not seeing it.
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They have stats. It’s half-and-half now; participation rate representative of the country. Unlike Threads and Bluesky which are primarily lefties.
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Brent:
Never forget that the left fled X not because it was censoring their speech – they left because X wouldn’t censor other people.
Leftist flight in the face of contrary opinion is apparently a thing. Witness ATiM itself.
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Any mention of the also prevalent “healthy at any size” eating disorder crowd?
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Exactly. It isn’t about health; it is about making certain people feel good about themselves.
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I thought this was good
https://x.com/Devon_Eriksen_/status/1869573024866828317
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Oh the irony if Trump is the one to eliminate the debt ceiling
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Hilarious:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2024/russian-sanctions-oligarch-yacht-us-taxpayers/
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This obviously means Hegseth is unqualified.
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It is fascinating how quickly the left coordinated the talking point that a potential shutdown is Elon Musk’s fault.
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And they do it like: nobody will notice how uniform and propagandistic this is, nobody will notice we are total shills, everybody will believe this is objective truth because we are the experts.
I really think this strategy is beginning to work against them. Even if you agree it just feels weird. Bad vibes.
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They believe their own bullshit.
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Indeed. And I’m getting the sense normies who still watch the news, or were until recently, are growing tired of watching these folks huffing their own farts.
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The funny thing is that they had absolutely no issue with George Clooney telling Biden he had to withdraw from the race.
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Interesting statement by Bannon here,
https://www.semafor.com/article/12/20/2024/we-have-to-increase-taxes-on-the-wealthy-steve-bannon
What would have incentivized corporations to invest the $200 billion into U.S. manufacturing? Bannon leaves the exact how out of it but hints at in the last sentence, “take a little pain”. My money is on global corporate interests over nationalist interests, but we’ll see.
I think Bannon is much less influential with Trump in a direct, personal way but has influence on a very motivated base. Trump tends to follow the lead of that base for the most part, when he’s in front of it he tends to be less successful.
For what it’s worth I have advocated for higher taxes on the wealthy, as defined by, say, $5,000,000 in assets outside of family farms and family owned businesses. Glenn Reynolds has often advocated for killing tax cuts geared for Entertainment. I’d also work on increasing taxes for the investment industry but doing that carries a lot of risk If another country opts to really go the stable Republic / Free Market route. I don’t see anybody on the horizon however.
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As I’ve observed before I’m a “progressive” at heart and would be fine with societal engineering via the tax code—such as providing incentives to spur investment in the country, by doing things like raising taxes on corporations and providing deductions for investment in manufacturing, maybe. Although if I was in a position to do something like that I’d have to give it a lot more thought.
It’s just that there are a million ways to do that sort of stuff wrong (most of them serving the existing power structure) and a handful they might be right. And can also later be leveraged in a self-serving manner for the existing power structure without careful and comprehensive protections. So very hard to do well in a way that creates positive outcomes. Which is why as a practical matter it always come back to “the government that governs best, governs least”.
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What Bannon misses is that manufacturing capacity utilization is on the low side. So there really isn’t much incentive to build new plant and equipment when you aren’t utilizing the capacity you have right now.
Companies do stock buybacks when they don’t have a better use for capital they have. They are a tax-efficient way of returning that capital to shareholders.
The issue is that raising corporate taxes won’t encourage capital investment. It will encourage companies to play transfer pricing games where they report as little income as possible in their US subsidiaries.
That said, I could see encouraging the development of chip fabs in the US, but the motivation there is more national security-related than an industrial policy.
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I suspect Bannon knows this and is dumbing down for Weigel at Semafor. Designing a tax structure that incentivizes U.S. production would, by lefty definition, benefit business and that is something that Cannot Be Said in lefty circles.
That said, it’s hard to drive production home when long distance shipping is cheap, reliable and safe. I’m not sure how to do that without tariffs. Also, environmental regulations are designed to disincentivize manufacturing and that needs to be emphasized to the public. Also, tackling this horseshit about climate change needs to be confronted and reversed as well.
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Why is Zelensky opining on Syria? Is this parody?
https://twitter.com/zelenskyyua/status/1871216838585016699
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He wants to help the Western world keep Russia in check!
I really hope Trump can force Ukraine and Russia into a resolution. Or failing that find some way to force Ukraine to have an election before getting any more weaponry from us. Something. I don’t understand why we would be involved internationally in another country’s war without having any interest in it, practically or morally.
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Arguably the two most corrupt countries on earth. The money laundering going on in Ukraine must be mind boggling.
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The dismissal of this by the crowd that wants us to keep the Ukraine war going is astounding.
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