Grease Up And Bend Over - Again

That Newsom Guy

California is now the 4th largest economy in the world.

I don't know if Newsom is the guy we need in the White House, but we could do a lot worse in terms of the economy (yeah, I know it's a really low bar - not sure how we could do any worse that what we've got now), but I worry that a Newsom presidency would not be the kind of change we should be pushing for.

He appears to be pretty strong on moving away from dirty fuels, and he's not weak on social issues like healthcare, civil rights, etc.

But he's something of a rich legacy puke (Wikipedia), so his pedigree may well lean him towards the ConservaDem thing where it always comes down to deferring to parasite billionaires and mega-corporations.

We'll see what we see.

Of all the prevailing media narratives around Gavin Newsom, the one that is most conspicuous by its absence is how under its two-term governor California became the top performing economy not just among its 49 siblings but also any developed nation. No wonderElon Musk quietly sought Newsom’s help when the world’s richest man sought to move a bunch of Tesla Inc. engineers back to the state after relocating them to Texas.

Amid the thousands of headlines referencing California failings with wildfires, droughts, floods, mass transportation, aging roads, education, homelessness, unaffordable housing, widening inequality and poverty along with the exodus of billionaires, corporate headquarters and longtime residents -- never mind the “slick” label whenever the betting favorite for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination is mentioned in the press – the Golden State (population 39 million people), just supplanted Japan (123 million) as the fourth-largest economy.

Gross domestic product surged 40% to more than $4 trillion, accounting for more than 14% of US output, after Newsom took office in January 2019. China’s, the world’s second-largest economy, expanded 32% and No. 3 Germany increased 16%, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. (The US dollar's appreciation was as little as 1.6% since the end of 2018 as measured by the Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index, so the currency wasn’t a primary factor behind California’s performance.)

The US is an also-ran competing with California's prosperity, based on indexes compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia that take state level nonfarm payroll employment, average hours worked in manufacturing by production employees, the unemployment rate and wage and salary disbursements that are then deflated by the consumer price index.
“We have had a theory” for California's superior performance “but it hasn't been validated in the way these numbers obviously provide,” said the 58-year-old Newsom during an April 1 Zoom interview. “So the timing could not be better.”

California's not-so-secret sauce happens to be the diversity between its citizens' ears instead of the fossil fuels generating the biggest share of Texas growth. Of the 10,000 companies in the Bloomberg World Large, Mid & Small Cap Index, the technology sector’s 20% share of their total value is the largest of any sector. And within that subset of technology, California leads with 41-based firms producing a 603% total return (income plus appreciation) over the past decade. That’s almost four times the gain of their global peers the past two, three and five years. Tech’s contribution to California’s GDP increased 59% since 2019, outperforming the 40% gain for states overall.

Healthcare shows a similar trajectory. The industry's contribution to California GDP increased by 52% since 2019 and including 2025, a year when President Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans enacted major cuts to Medicaid and reduced Affordable Care Act premium tax credits, resulting in an estimated 15 million people losing health coverage. California's uninsured rate declined to a record-low 6.4% in 2023, the largest drop in the US, from more than 17% a decade ago, helped by the Covered California and Medi-Cal expanded coverage programs.

Although “some of California's most prominent venture capitalists have a proclivity for slamming their state, arguing that fiscal mismanagement and high taxes will cause startups to form elsewhere,” the opposite is happening, according to Axios. “California startups raised a whopping 62% of all U.S. venture capital dollars in 2025,'' Axios notes, citing the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor, more than either 2024 (54.2%) or 2023 (46.9%), as well as the decade-earlier mark of 47.2%.

Even when artificial intelligence giants OpenAI, Anthropic and DataBricks dominate, the state remained “home to 31.5% of US VC deals last year, compared to 31.7% in 2024 and 29.1% in 2023,'' according to data referenced by Axios. “In 2015, California's market share was 32.5%. For context, the runner-up in 2025 was New York with 13.3%. Massachusetts was next, just ahead of Texas — both below 6%. The bottom line: California's crown may be tarnished on social media. On spreadsheets, however, it still sparkles.”

California companies are similarly booming, spending $527 billion annually on acquisitions during Newsom’s tenure, almost three times the $179 billion spent annually in the 20 years prior to 2019, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Software and technology services accounted for $1.9 trillion, including SpaceX's $250 billion offer for xAI. The healthcare industry initiated $410 billion of transactions, including Thousand Oaks-based Amgen's $27 billion purchase of Ireland’s Horizon Therapeutics PLC in 2023. The deal enabled the biotechnology medicines company to increase its market value 39% to $200 billion.

Even accounting for less than 12% of the US population, California contributed more than 40% of the growth in the value of nation's publicly traded equities as measured by the companies in the Russell 3000 Index, which returned 182% for investors since 2019. California accounted for 70 percentage points, more than triple No. 2 Washington (20 points), almost five times No. 3 Texas (15 points) and No. 4 New York (13 points) and almost 12 times No. 5 Ohio (6 points), according to data compiled by Bloomberg. California-based companies overall returned 328% to investors, crushing the equity returns from the world's largest economies: US, 182%; China, 89%; Germany, 110%; Japan, 96%; and India, 63%, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

None of this is accidental. Sixteen years after it became a state in 1850, California passed its first compulsory education law, requiring children aged eight to 14 to attend school. With more than 600 colleges and universities, California today has no peers in higher education, whether in the US or any of the world's developed economies. No. 2 New York has 423, Germany 420 and the UK no more than 300. California graduates more engineers than any state and pays the highest wages when they join the workforce.

California's relative value among investors is reflected in the municipal bond market, where two of the top 10 performing issuers tied to education are based. The University of California, No. 1 in total return, accounts for 12% of the 800 issuers' gains, and No. 3 California State University contributes 5%, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That's another way of saying investors in California are getting 11% of their return from the University of California, the Los Angeles Unified School District and California State University. California's investment in education translates as one college or university for 64,000 citizens compared to 266,000 in the UK and 199,000 in Germany.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Newsom became “the first sitting governor to visit the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach… since Ronald Reagan,” said Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles, the biggest US gateway to global trade, handling more than $300 billion of cargo annually. “That’s a statement,'' Seroka said during an interview at Bloomberg headquarters in New York earlier this year. “In the line-item budgets of the last three fiscal years,” Newsom “has helped with additional infrastructure spending, hard infrastructure line-item budgets, our transition to zero emissions on both equipment and electricity.”

Whatever criticism Newsom receives from environmentalists for not doing enough to hold corporate polluters accountable, he still gets relatively high marks for promoting investments in resilience, clean energy and clean transportation. The eight California-based clean energy companies with a minimum market value of $100 million have seen the value of their stocks appreciate an average 56% since 2019, compared to 40% for their global peers. Their 7% average annual gain in revenue crushes the 5% global average. California renewable energy companies will see 17% revenue growth in the coming year, more than doubling the 7% increase of global peers, according to analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg.
San Francisco, where Newsom began his political career and was its two-time mayor, is the only US city that reduced pollutants by more than 20%, according to the analysis of almost 100 cities around the world.

The global transition to zero-emission vehicles -- decreasing air pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide and greenhouse gases -- began in Fremont, California, with Tesla, the world's largest automaker with a market capitalization of $1.4 trillion, or more than four times perennial sales leader Toyota Motor Corp. Even after Musk, Tesla’s CEO, decried California as “a land of taxes, over-regulation and litigation” when he moved the company’s headquarters along with its research and development leadership to Texas in 2021, the world’s richest person admitted a year later that Tesla couldn’t succeed without California-based engineers.

“I will never forget” when Musk “called me,” said Newsom. “He said, `I'm surprised you're picking up the phone. I may actually ask you for some help” because “I can't find the talent in Texas. Don't say a word.’”

Today's Belle

Low GDP Growth, plus High Unemployment, plus Rising Prices is the formula for Stagflation.

Targets:

• GDP Growth    2%
• Unemployment  4%
• Inflation     2% 

Currently:

• GDP Growth    0.7%
• Unemployment  4.4% 
• Inflation     2.5%

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development projects inflation to hit 4.2% for the year.

Consumer Confidence is dropping.

Consumer Expectation is dropping.

Affordability

Fed’s Preferred Gauge Shows Accelerating December Inflation Trends

The personal-consumption expenditures price index increased by 0.4% in December

Key inflation metrics tracked by the Federal Reserve accelerated at the end of last year, underscoring why many Fed officials have turned cautious about supporting further interest-rate cuts.

The personal-consumption expenditures price index increased by 0.4% in December, after rising by 0.2% in November, the Commerce Department said Friday.

That lifted the 12-month PCE inflation rate to 2.9%, up from 2.8% in November. Core PCE inflation—which excludes volatile food and energy prices—ticked up to 3% in the 12 months through December, from 2.8% a month earlier.

The numbers are roughly aligned with forecasts from analysts, who can use other inflation metrics to forecast PCE inflation with great accuracy. The report also is more lagged than usual, because last fall’s government shutdown has caused cascading delays in the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s publication calendar.

But the figures point to one reason many Fed officials have turned hesitant about easing their policy stance further despite January’s decline in the consumer-price index, now at 2.4%. PCE inflation, not the CPI, is the metric against which the Fed gauges progress toward its 2% inflation target, and it has consistently hovered above that target for most of half a decade.

Much of the time, PCE inflation tends to run cooler than CPI inflation, but for now, the pattern has reversed. That is in large part because housing inflation, which has cooled steadily, plays a bigger part in the CPI calculation than in the PCE calculation, UBS economist Alan Detmeister has observed.

Minutes from the Fed’s January meeting published Wednesday showed that a contingent of Fed officials thinks that at 3.5% to 3.75%, the Fed’s current rate target is near a neutral level that is no longer working to restrain economic growth and rising prices. At last month’s Fed meeting, the minutes showed, one set of officials urged the group to consider communicating that going forward, rate increases may be as much a possibility as further cuts.

The December PCE inflation numbers are unlikely to be very impactful for traders, who are largely already focused on what the January PCE inflation reading will show when released on March 13. That will be the latest PCE data the Fed will have in hand at its next policy meeting, March 17-18.

Using numbers available from the January CPI report, many economists are estimating that the January PCE data will show 12-month core inflation steady at 3% or even increasing to 3.1%.

The report also showed that Americans’ personal income rose by 0.3% in December, while their consumer spending increased by 0.4%.

Today's Belle

• Stickiness
• Elasticity
• Shrinkflation
• Short attention span

The prices we're paying are tied directly to the combination of tariffs, plus the exporting country's inflation rate.

You want a new rug for the kitchen? A year ago it was $100. In April 2025, Trump hit the country where it's made with a 50% tariff. And that tariff smacked that country's economy badly enough that its inflation rate popped up into the low double digits - say 12%.

Your new 100-dollar kitchen rug will now cost you about $170.

EVERYTHING TRUMP TOUCHES

TURNS TO SHIT

Bad Moon On The Rise

CCR:

About Those Tariffs

via google:

A Kiel Institute for the World Economy study found that American importers and consumers bear nearly all (96%) of the costs from recent U.S. tariffs, contradicting claims that foreign producers pay, with foreign firms absorbing only about 4% through price cuts. Analyzing $4 trillion in trade, the research showed these tariffs act as a consumption tax on Americans, boosting U.S. revenue but increasing domestic prices and reducing trade volumes rather than forcing foreign price concessions. The study highlights that while generating revenue, tariffs primarily shift costs to U.S. businesses and households, hurting the U.S. economy most.

Key Findings from the Kiel Institute Study

• Cost Burden: U.S. importers and consumers pay 96% of the tariff cost, while foreign exporters absorb only 4%
• Mechanism: Tariffs function as a domestic consumption tax, with higher prices passed on to American buyers
• Trade Impact: Instead of price cuts, targeted foreign exporters reduced trade volumes, choosing to maintain margins on fewer sales
• Counter to Policy Claims: The findings challenge the narrative that tariffs are a cost borne by trading partners, demonstrating they extract revenue from the U.S. economy.

Broader Economic Effects

• U.S. Economy Harmed: The Kiel Institute's KITE model projects significant harm to the U.S., with potential drops in output, higher consumer prices, and reduced exports
• Global Impact: Tariffs affect all countries, though to varying degrees, with the EU also experiencing negative impacts

In essence, the Kiel Institute study concludes that US tariffs largely function as a tax on Americans, increasing costs for consumers and businesses rather than extracting concessions from foreign entities.

Say What?

$1600 a month isn't exactly one helluva bargain, but in a fairly hot resort town like Steamboat, it's not bad.

I'll stay skeptical since it sounds a lot like "company housing", and I'm not going to give any billionaire any credit for suddenly developing some sense of altruistic do-gooder thing.

My default position is still:

Billionaires are parasites

And I won't be changing that until I see consistent, widespread, and ongoing evidence to the contrary.

Steamboat Springs billionaire buys new apartment complex and slashes rent to help curb housing shortage

Venture capital investor and Steamboat Springs resident Mark Stevens acquired the 104-unit Riverview apartment complex for more than $95 million and offered units for well below market rates

Landin Hutchison was ready. The minute the office at the Riverview apartment complex opened, he was there with money in hand. A month later, he and his partner, Piper Rillos, who works with special needs students at Sleeping Giant School, and their 2-year-old son were moving into a new two-bedroom apartment in downtown Steamboat Springs, paying a little over $2,100 a month .

“We are pretty much saving a grand a month and living in town now,” said Hutchinson, a construction worker who moved his family from a home near Oak Creek a half-hour away. “We feel very, very fortunate. There are a lot of people here who are super appreciative of this opportunity.”

There are more than 100 local residents like Hutchison and Rillos in the new Riverview apartment buildings who can thank the complex’s new owner, 970 Steamboat LLC, which spent $95.3 million on the Riverview apartment complex in September.

The two buildings — a 64,000-square-foot apartment building on about an acre and a 42,000-square-foot building on a half-acre — on the banks of the Yampa River were envisioned as luxury apartments before 970 Steamboat LLC bought the buildings and announced they would rent to working locals for below-market rate prices. The record-setting transaction equated to more than $916,000 per unit.

The apartments were offered a month ago at low rates to anyone working more than 30 hours a week in the valley. There are no income qualifications or requirements for applying through the local housing authority.

“It’s life-changing for these two,” said Kipp Rillos, a professor at Colorado Mountain College who raised Piper and her two siblings in Steamboat Springs, as he moved his daughter into her new home. “They might be able to find a way to stay.”

The Riverview project has a long and unsettled history in Steamboat Springs. A developer in 2004 first proposed a condo-canyoned village on the 5-acre riverfront parcel, with 70-plus luxury units, seven affordable homes, a hotel, commercial space and underground parking. The late-aughts recession deflated those plans and the project sat largely dormant until 2017.

A Chicago-based investment group that took over the project in the Great Recession listed the entire parcel for sale in 2018 at $31.9 million. But the parcel was sold off piecemeal, with single-family and duplex lots selling for about $1 million, and Natural Grocers and local restaurants buying commercial lots.

Gorman and Company built the apartment complexes last year, with a low-interest loan from the city’s short-term rental tax fund to include 11 workforce housing units. The deal gave the city 11 deed-restricted units out of the 104 units in the two buildings. Gorman and Co. has developed more than 800 affordable housing units across the high country, most of them in Routt and Summit counties.

Then in September, that 970 Steamboat LLC group — which filed organization documents with the Colorado Secretary of State in August — swooped in and bought the whole project.

But unlike the anonymous donor who gave $24 million in 2021 to the Yampa Valley Housing Authority to buy the 534-acre Brown Ranch for local housing and worked hard to conceal their identity, this acquisition is trackable in Routt County records.

The two parcels purchased by 970 Steamboat LLC list an ownership address in Menlo Park, California. The address is the office of S-Cubed Capital, a private family office investment firm founded and managed by billionaire investor Mark Stevens. Stevens and his wife, Mary, have lived in Steamboat Springs since 2020 and in 2021 they bought the 562-acre Strawberry Park Ranch north of downtown.

Stevens is an early investor in tech companies like Nvidia and a minority owner of the Golden State Warriors NBA team. Emails to him and his S-Cubed Capital offices in Menlo Park and Steamboat Springs were not returned. Mark and Mary Stevens in 2013 launched an ongoing philanthropic campaign by announcing they were joining the “The Giving Pledge,” a billionaire-driven philanthropic mission with members like Bill Gates, Ted Turner, MacKenzie Scott and Warren Buffett, to give away a majority of their wealth.

The Stevenses are among a growing number of billionaire investors focusing their urban-generated wealth on Colorado’s mountain towns. Billionaire Mark Walters, who owns the Los Angeles Dodgers, has spent several years buying commercial buildings in downtown Crested Butte. Billionaire energy baron Bill Koch built his own Western town for his art collection outside Paonia. Cable magnate Bob Fanch, owner of Devil’s Thumb Ranch in the Fraser River Valley, is developing hundreds of homes as well as commercial and community spaces in Winter Park. And there are somewhere around 80 billionaires who own homes around Aspen, where Chicago investor Mark Hunt has bought up large swaths of downtown.

“The folks we are trying to house do not have a decade”

A month after buying the Riverview project, 970 Steamboat LLC listed units for rent at prices well below market rates. The line formed quickly for studios renting for $925 a month, two-bedrooms for $1,600 and three bedrooms for $2,125. And aside from the 11 units previously set aside for city workers, there is no public subsidy for the apartments. The qualifications to rent are not tied to income or area median income charts, which have been skewed in mountain towns as work-from-homers relocate to rural communities. The only requirement for renting in Riverview is that tenants work in the community.

“Riverview serves the heart of the Steamboat community by providing true affordability for local workers. This is more than just a place to live in Steamboat, Riverview is about maintaining Steamboat’s culture, community, and connection (with) affordable housing for the neighbors who keep our town strong,” Kimball Crangle, the president of Gorman’s Colorado operations, said in an email. “The people who power this community deserve to live where they work and continue to make Steamboat thrive.”

In increasingly pricey mountain towns, where housing projects take many years to plan, approve and develop and often face stiff opposition from locals irked by density, could the acquisition of existing market-rate complexes become a model for swift answers to acute housing shortages in Colorado’s high country? Could one solution to the high country housing crisis be found in the benevolence of billionaires?

“Much of the high country is tired of growing inequities. Long-term solutions that arise from a home-grown concept will have success in moving forward,” said Crangle, who declined to discuss the ownership of 970 Steamboat LLC. “Conversely, plans that languish soak up the opportunity cost of time, public dollars and attention. In the meantime, that snowball just continues to gain speed while the years just keep ticking by.”

In Steamboat Springs, where voters last year rejected a Yampa Valley Housing Authority plan tobuild 2,264 homes on the Brown Ranch parcel the authority acquired with the anonymous donation, “speed of execution is probably the name of the game right now,” authority director Jason Peasley said.

“Taking something that is built or entitled or further along in the approval process is something we are looking hard at because of the fact that it can accelerate delivery,” Peasley said. “We have a big need right now and in the time it takes to go through the process of acquiring the land and planning the project and getting entitled and then building it … you can easily take a decade. The folks we are trying to house do not have a decade. They don’t even have a few years.”

The Yampa Valley Housing Authority last month began selling units in the Cottonwoods at Mid Valley complex from $266,000 to $464,000, offering the deed-restricted apartments for more than 50% below market rates. The 86-unit development, built with $10 million from the city’s short-term rental tax fund, has a list of more than 300 locals who had lined up to buy, Peasley said. It is the first large offering of for-sale affordable units in more than 20 years in Steamboat Springs.

“Our needs are running away from us and our ability to deliver is not keeping up,” Peasley said. “It’s exciting to see people stepping up with new ideas and different ways to execute. We need to hit this problem with an all-of-the-above strategy.”

Truth Bomb

I can quibble with him on a coupla points, but no lies have been detected.

BTW, the dream isn't dead as long as people with living thinking brains have just a little hope.

The Shawshank Redemption 1994:

A Simple Thing

Wanna know if a guy who shits in a gold toilet cares about you? Check your last bank statement - if you're closer to being homeless than you are to being a millionaire corporate officer, you've got your answer.

The Jobs Thing

  Unemployment
+ Inflation      

= Stagflation

There's a strong probability we're already in the kind of recession that played hell with an awful lot of Americans in the 70s.

It was a time of transition. We were trying to go from the glory days of post-WW2 expansion of the empire to actual globalization. It was also when we really began to find out that we had taught the world how to beat us at our own game, but we got all pissed off when they started to show they could do it.

Japan and Germany were building better cars and electronics, and making better and cheaper steel. France and Spain were turning out American-branded TVs and home appliances that were as good as any built here, and selling at a lower price.

Throw in a couple of nasty oil shocks, and we ended the decade in double-digit inflation, which gave the money-grubbers all the incentive, opportunity, and justification they needed to buy more congress critters and begin dismantling the middle class.

History doesn't repeat - but it sure as fuck rhymes. So here we go again.

Long-term unemployment at post-pandemic high, straining workers and economy

More Americans are experiencing joblessness for six months or more, a sign of labor market’s weakness ahead of the Federal Reserve’s highly anticipated meeting this week.

More Americans are facing stretches of unemployment of six months or more, a worrisome sign for the U.S. economy.

More than 1 in 4 workers without jobs have been unemployed for at least half a year, new data shows. That number is a post-pandemic high and a level typically only seen during periods of economic turmoil.

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In all, more than 1.9 million Americans had been unemployed “long term” in August, meaning they have been out of work for 27 weeks or more, a critical cliff when it comes to finding a job. That’s nearly double the 1 million people who were in a similar position in early 2023.

“We have a low-hire, low-fire environment — and that stagnancy means there aren’t a lot of new positions for people to move into,” said Laura Ullrich, director of economic research at the jobs site Indeed. “The probability of becoming unemployed has not gone up that much, but if you become unemployed, it’s much harder to find a job.”

Six months of unemployment often signals a turning point in a person’s job search, according to economists. They’ve likely run out of unemployment insurance benefits and severance payments by then, leaving them on shakier financial ground. People who have been unemployed for more than six months are also more likely to become discouraged and stop looking for work altogether.

The data shows how broadly the job market has cooled ahead of the Federal Reserve’s highly-anticipated meeting this week, when policymakers are expected to lower interest rates for the first time this year. Two months of weaker-than-expected jobs numbers, including widespread revisions, have led policymakers to voice concerns that the labor market could continue deteriorating.

Since 1950, the long-term unemployment rate has exceeded 25 percent in only a few other instances and always after a recession: for one month, June 1983, after an inflation-fueled recession; for an eight-year stretch following the Great Recession in 2009; and for about a year and half during the coronavirus pandemic.

The pickup in months-long unemployment coincides with broader cooling in the labor market. Although the overall unemployment rate, 4.3 percent, is near longtime lows, many employers have frozen hiring as they wait to see how new tariffs and other economic policies will affect business. Layoffs are rising, too, with weekly claims for unemployment insurance reaching the highest level since October 2021.

For the unemployed, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find new work — now an average six months, a month longer than before the pandemic, according to Labor Department data. And for the first time in four years, there are more unemployed people in the United States than there are job openings.

“I have 15-plus years in IT, I thought I should be able to step into any job,” said Steve Beal, 47, who has been unemployed since March 2024, when he was laid off from a six-figure job at Best Buy’s corporate office in Minnesota. “But so far I’ve applied to at least 300 jobs and it’s all rejections. Even with referrals, networking, résumé services, I haven’t gotten anywhere.”

Separate data this week showed that Americans’ confidence in their ability to find a new job is at a record low. A survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that people say there’s less than a 45 percent chance they could find a job in the next three months if they were to suddenly become unemployed, which is the lowest reading since the survey began in 2013.

Felicia Enriquez, a paralegal in Los Angeles, lost her job in July 2024. In the 14 months since, she’s applied to hundreds of openings without success. Local government jobs have dried up, and even temp agencies are coming up empty, she said.

Her unemployment benefits — $400 a week — ran out in February, and she’s six months behind on rent. So far Enriquez’s landlord has been understanding, but she said she worries about what will happen to her and her 16-year-old daughter when that good will runs out. Already, she’s relying on food stamps to buy groceries.

“It gets harder the longer it gets. That’s the vicious part,” the 47-year-old said. “At the beginning, when you lose your job you have money saved up, you get unemployment, things are okay. But when that runs out, then you really have to worry.”

Studies have found that workers who are unemployed long-term are less likely to find jobs than others. They’re also more likely to drop out of the workforce entirely. A 2014 study by economists at Princeton University found that nearly half of those unemployed for seven months or longer, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, ended up leaving the labor force.

“The longer people linger in unemployment, the more likely they are to lose their contacts and connections, and after an extended period of time, their skills can depreciate,” said Francine Blau, a labor economist and professor emeritus at Cornell University. “And there is the possibility that employers see [long-term unemployment] as a sign of a less desirable worker.”

Finding work has been especially tough for younger workers and recent college graduates, who are entering a job market with few entry-level openings. The share of unemployed workers who are new to the labor force remains elevated after hitting a 37-year high earlier this summer.

Nelson E. Caballero graduated in December with a degree in communications from Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia. He said he’s emailed his résumé and cover letter to every public relations firm in the Washington, D.C., area with entry-level openings but has gotten just three responses in nine months: All telling him they’re not hiring at the moment.

The 27-year-old is living with his parents and fretting about what comes next.

“I feel stuck,” Caballero said. “Moving out, buying a car, getting married — it all feels like a pipe dream right now. I don’t mind living with mom and dad, but they can’t keep supporting me forever.”

In Grantsville, Utah, Jessica Howard lost her job seven months ago at a health care technology company, after 17 years there. Since then, she’s spruced up her résumé several times and applied to nearly 400 jobs. But finding a new position feels impossible, she said, especially since she’s competing with many others laid off this year.

For now, Howard has temporarily put her mortgage on hold and is using savings to pay for food, gas and other necessities. But it’s been tough to keep sending out applications and preparing for interviews After months of trying.

“They say not to take it personally, but after a while the rejections really get to you,” she said. “It kills your confidence and you start to wonder: Do I really have these skills? Have I ever had these skills? It starts to break you down emotionally.”

Today's Belle

Everything's fine until it isn't.

Asshole bean-counters, and coin-operated politicians, and slimy-dog captains of industry have been chipping away at this thing for decades, finding new and better ways to take a little more profit and leave a few more "other people" holding the bag - creating a mess that looks brand new and totally alien.

And when it finally craters in on itself, everybody's going to be surprised - "How could we possibly have seen this coming!?!"

Today's Rich

Today's Mr Global

Artificial Scarcity:

When goods or services are made to appear scarce, even when there's enough capacity to produce or share them, often to increase demand and prices

And when you own several coin-operated politicians in the US government, you can do just about anything you want.

The Slam Is Coming

First:

On average, President Two-Weeks has flip-flopped on tariffs every 4 days.

Second:

He's 0-fer-90 on his trade deals.

Third:

The business bros are ignoring all this weird shit and forging ahead, &/or finding ways to countervail it.

Fourth:

I think we can expect higher prices long after the main effects of tariffs ease off. Sellers who enjoy relatively high profit margins may be willing to eat some of the tariffs, but grocers (eg) don't have that option.

And we've already seen what happens when prices go up because of natural causes, and then don't go back down once the market's upward pressure has eased. The parasite investor class won't tolerate low or no dividends for long, and they're going to expect companies to make it up to them.

Today's Belle

It's not policy - it's a mood swing.

Amy Siskind

New for me today: ADP hiring report says 62,000 non-farm pay check jobs were added in April.

How that stacks up against what Trump's DOL has to say in a few days, we'll just have to see.

note: We need 120-130,000 new jobs every month to keep the ball rolling.

Could be interesting. I think we all know Trump isn't exactly above tinkering with the numbers, so if Labor reports a nice high (ie: made up) number, I hope the Dems are smart enough to play it against the usual Republican refrain: "Who ya gonna believe - private enterprise or da gubmint?"

Meanwhile,

This remains unconfirmed:

But how can we be sure it's not legit?

The Point

When Howard Lutnick railed about the American dream not being about buying cheap goods from China, that wasn't criticism or a call to greatness - that was him telling us what Republicans intend to do to American workers.

GOP policies have been aimed at making us all "Chinese peasants" for 50 years - and they're not even trying to disguise it now.

A coalition of hundreds of employers is asking the Trump administration to override the NLRB and dictate labor law

With the Trump administration implementing a blizzard of anti-worker initiatives on a near-daily basis, it’s difficult to imagine that these early assaults could be only the tip of the iceberg. But President Trump and billionaire Elon Musk may well have far worse plans to attack U.S. workers and labor relations.

One little-seen proposal from outside the White House has the potential to upend our entire system of labor relations. It comes from the “Coalition for a Democratic Workplace” (CDW)—an anti-union trade association of several hundred employers and employer associations, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers. The coalition sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi asking her to repudiate and invalidate more than a dozen major decisions issued by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) during the Biden administration, and to instruct all NLRB appointees and employees that they cannot treat these properly issued decisions as governing law.

The decisions in question address important issues like which workers have the right to form and join a union and what remedies are available to workers who are illegally fired in retaliation for exercising their rights in the workplace. Like all decisions issued by the NLRB—a multi-member body that acts as a court to adjudicate labor disputes—they were issued after full briefing and consideration of the issues and are treated as precedent governing subsequent cases.

Ordinarily, the way employers try to get the NLRB to change a decision they disagree with is to challenge the decision on appeal. Many of the decisions identified in the memo have been challenged, and those court proceedings are in progress. Employers also have the ability to argue to the Board in future cases that it should revisit its own precedent. The NLRB would then consider the issue and arguments and decide whether to change its earlier decision. This process comports with the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), which requires agencies to engage in “reasoned decision-making” when deciding cases. In other words, the agency has to explain itself when it changes course—it can’t just declare a new rule.

In what would be a radical—and clearly unlawful—departure from these well-established avenues for appeal, the employer coalition has asked Pam Bondi—who has no background or experience in labor relations—to unilaterally invalidate more than a dozen NLRB decisions with the stroke of a pen. While there is nothing in the National Labor Relations Act or any other federal law giving the attorney general any authority to overturn a NLRB decision, CDW cites President Trump’s executive order on independent agencies as authority for this action. That executive order purports to give the attorney general the authority to impose their own interpretation of any law onto independent agencies like the NLRB.

This dangerous suggestion is clearly unlawful in numerous respects. First, it completely undermines Congress’s directive that the NLRB functions as an independent agency, with labor disputes adjudicated by a panel of experts insulated from political influence. Second, if the agency did comply with this directive and revert to the law as it existed prior to the targeted decisions, any decisions following this earlier law would clearly run afoul of the Administrative Procedure Act, as the agency’s changed course would have no statutory explanation at all—the exact opposite of the “reasoned decision-making” that the APA requires.

Perhaps even more alarming is the damage this would do to our nation’s labor relations in the long term. One of the oft-cited criticisms of the NLRB is that the Board changes course and reverses itself too often, causing instability in the law. While reasonable minds can differ about how often is “too often” to revisit precedent, management and labor alike should be in agreement that abandoning the very concept of precedent altogether would be a huge step in the wrong direction.

Let’s play it out. If this scheme is successful and somehow withstands judicial review (a big if), the Trump administration could immediately undo all significant legal precedents issued by the NLRB during the Biden administration. Indeed, if an attorney general can unilaterally impose their own reading of the law on the agency without restriction, there is nothing to stop Attorney General Bondi from going further and directing the agency to abandon far longer-standing precedents with which she disagrees. Literally any aspect of labor law that has not been explicitly endorsed by the federal courts would be ripe for instantaneous revision at any time. And nothing would stop a future administration from doing the exact same thing—instantaneously revising all of labor law in a pro-worker direction and overturning any decision that favored management. Labor law would become so unpredictable and changeable as to be effectively useless. Workers and employers would bring cases before the NLRB at their peril—under the CDW’s view of things, any favorable ruling could be immediately erased by the attorney general.

Unfortunately, the lessons of history demonstrate all too well the danger to workers, employers, and the economy that can result—such as labor unrest and economic disruption—when there is no neutral entity that people can turn to in resolving disputes.

One would hope that is not the goal of any of the businesses and trade associations that comprise the CDW. Any reasonable employer should take prompt action to denounce this radical agenda and ensure it dies a quick and well-deserved death.

This Will Not Be Fun

It seems unclear when we'll start to feel the crunch, but we're very much in line to expect increases in the cost of just about everything we buy. Duh.

And part of that problem is that some companies whose stuff isn't imported - or are selling stuff that's impacted just a little - will see the tariffs as an opportunity to jack up their prices right along with everybody else.

And I'll go out on the limb here and say there are politicians just itchin' to use the potentially backbreaking effects of the tariffs as leverage to kill taxes altogether (some have talked about this for a long time, and we're getting it from Trump now too). We may start to hear about attempts to re-animate some variation on the stupid idea that a flat tax is the fairest way to do things.

Also - there have been proposals floated that we should ditch income tax and go with a universal sales tax, or a value-added tax. This is all regressive as fuck and pushes what's left of the middle class down - and keeps everybody down - while benefiting only people who're making more than 3 or 4 hundred K.

I hate this shit. When we had a graduating, progressive tax schedule, it helped drive the societal machinery that made for a strong and stable middle class, which build up the best overall system ever.

Fake lord knows it wasn't perfect - far from it - but by the middle 60s it seemed like everybody was going to have a shot at the dream. And we'd begun to understand that when everybody has a shot, and everybody understands that everybody deserves it, then we're making the whole thing better for ourselves.

I sound like a sad old man waxing nostalgic, so back to the point:

This latest bullshit feels like more coercion. If they make us miserable enough, we'll bend to their will and sign on for whatever might ease the pressure.

So here's a look at what WaPo thinks is headed our way.

Here’s where prices could rise the most and least under Trump’s tariffs

Shoppers will see uneven price increases on goods.

The global tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump this week will cause prices to rise on a broad array of food, household items and electronics, economists warn.

But the increases won’t be applied equally — some items are likely to see much higher price hikes than others. Trump imposed 10 percent tariffs on imports from nearly every country and imposed higher rates on goods coming from about 60 specific countries.

Consumer goods will be more exposed to higher tariffs than food and drinks

That means products that the United States commonly gets from Vietnam, such as clothing and shoes, would be subject to a new 46 percent tax, whereas goods from Colombia, like flowers, would see a lower new 10 percent levy. Imports from Mexico, such as avocados, will have no new tax. In any case, shopping is about to get more expensive for Americans.

“There’s no way this is going to be absorbed by firms alone,” said Michael Pearce, deputy chief U.S. economist at Oxford Economics. “This will be felt by consumers.”

The vast majority of consumer goods — almost 80 percent — brought into United States will be subject to tariffs of at least 20 percent, according to a Washington Post analysis of international trade data from the Census Bureau.

Canada and Mexico weren’t included in the latest round of tariffs, though a 25 percent tax was placed earlier this year on some of the goods they export to the United States.

“I think Mexico is breathing a sigh of relief,” said Michael Camuñez, president and CEO of Monarch Global Strategies, which advises businesses in international trade.

Mexico and Canada are the United States’ largest trading partners for food, and imports can avoid tariffs entirely if they are compliant with the U.S.-Mexico-Canada (USMCA) agreement. Still, experts expect food prices to rise somewhat with the new tariffs.

“The bottom line is, it does mean more inflation,” said Tom Bailey, a senior consumer foods analyst at Rabobank.

The prices of food products from other parts of the world, such as tea from Vietnam, could increase much more sharply with the high tax rates.

“Some retailers might just hang up a sign to consumers in shops and say, ‘price plus tariff,’” said Judy Ganes, president of J Ganes Consulting, which works with food and agricultural industries.

Bailey cautioned that prices will not rise exactly in line with the percentage of tariffs — a 46 percent tariff does not mean the final product will cost 46 percent more. Actual increases on finished goods are expected to be much less because some of the cost of the product comes from distribution and operations in the United States.

Countries in Asia are facing some of the highest rates, including goods from China, with tariffs of at least 54 percent, and goods from Vietnam, with a new 46 percent tax. That’s sure to mean higher prices for electronics such as phones, computers and video game consoles, which are often imported from the continent. The tariff imposed on goods from China could add roughly $250 or more to the cost of a $1,000 iPhone, though it’s not clear yet how much of the tariff costs would show up in consumer sticker prices.

The United States Fashion Industry Association said in a statement it was “disappointed” that the Trump administration imposed tariffs on the industry’s trading partners.

Most of the clothing sold in the U.S. is imported from abroad, and even clothing made domestically often relies on fabrics and yarn that are brought in from other countries, said Sheng Lu, a professor of fashion and apparel studies at the University of Delaware.

Apart from paying the new tariffs, clothing companies could also face a pullback from consumers, as people grow increasingly wary about their personal finances.

“If consumers do not feel safe about their financial outlook, they may stop buying clothing,” Lu said.

It Won't Get Better

Near the end of this piece, Steven Rattner hits the mark by identifying the problems of income & wealth disparity, and the long slide from middle class prosperity into stagnation.

But he fails to fully acknowledge that the causes lie, in large part, with short-sighted corporate policies, and the lopsided advantages handed to big companies and their management teams.

None of this gets better until we burn a few CEOs at the stake.

    IF WE TAX THE RICH NOW

WE WON'T HAVE TO EAT THEM LATER