Ruby Red Iowa Backed Trump by 13 Points in '24. Now It's Battleground
All this winning.
Please, Mr President,
we can't take any more
of this winning.
Showing posts with label economics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label economics. Show all posts
May 2, 2026
Drudge
Ruby Red Iowa Backed Trump by 13 Points in '24. Now It's Battleground
Apr 20, 2026
And Away We Go
We've paid the tariffs - and we'll continue to pay them - but we'll never get any of that money back. Some businesses will - probably - but not us.
Businesses race to apply for tariff refunds
The U.S. Customs portal is ready to begin accepting refund requests from businesses that paid President Trump's tariffs before the Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional.
After weeks of waiting to hear how — or whether — the U.S. government might refund the tariffs struck down by the Supreme Court, businesses began applying to get their money back on Monday.
Imagine tens of thousands of business owners with their fingers hovering over laptops, ready to enter America's hottest new queue: the U.S. tariff refund portal.
"I sort of took the early-bird-catches-the-worm approach," said Sarah Wells, who logged on 10 minutes before the launch at 8 a.m. Eastern Time.
Wells sells imported backpacks and other products for nursing mothers. She said uploading records of the levies she's paid was "smooth and fast."
Refunds are expected in 60 to 90 days.
Monday marks just the first phase of refunds, so not all the goods imported under the illegal tariffs immediately qualify.
Still, this is a turning point for U.S. importers, who've waited for clarity ever since the U.S. Supreme Court declared most of President Trump's tariffs unconstitutional. The high court did not opine on the process of refunds, and government officials at first suggested the process could prove unwieldy.
Trump's tariffs likely cost you hundreds of dollars. Will you get a refund?
"Small businesses organized, spoke out, and won a major victory," said Main Street Alliance, which advocates for U.S. small businesses, in a statement. "Now, the federal government must follow through with a refund process that truly works for Main Street."
U.S. Customs has estimated that it owes a total of $166 billion in tariff refunds, and the agency's legal filings suggest that the initial phase would tackle the majority of affected imports. Last Tuesday, a Customs official told a judge that the vast majority of eligible importers signed up for electronic payments, as the agency is requiring, and that group is owed about $127 billion.
Will consumers see any of that money land in their pockets? Probably not, economics and legal experts say.
The cost of tariffs has been woven into the prices of many products in a way that can make it hard to separate out what customers ultimately paid. Often, manufacturers, suppliers, importers, retailers and shoppers all absorb costs along the way. And with tariffs landing on the heels of historic inflation, companies big and small have argued that they ate much of the cost to avoid spooking shoppers with higher prices.
How have prices changed in a year? NPR checked 114 items at Walmart
In fact, many retailers find themselves in a similar quandary because tariff refunds will go to whoever paid the actual customs bill. It's unclear how, or if, the refunds might trickle down to store owners who paid tariff surcharges to their suppliers.
"As a retailer, I didn't pay tariffs directly. However, I did pay them indirectly in the form of higher wholesale prices," said Joe Kimray, owner of B & W Hardware in North Carolina. Most of his products are either made abroad or use imported parts.
"I plan to have conversations with a number of manufacturers and hope that they will do the right thing and share some of the tariff refund money with us," he said. "I don't expect to get a direct refund check from anyone, but it could be even as simple as offering discounts on the wholesale cost of future product purchases."
Shoppers hoping to recoup their own tariff expenses have launched class-action lawsuits against several companies, including Costco and FedEx. The shipping giant has pledged to pass down any refunds it receives. Costco's CEO last month told investors the company would return shoppers' money through "lower prices and better values" and would be transparent about its plans.
U.S. Customs' initial phase of refunds focuses on tariff payments that haven't been finalized because they technically are still under federal review. (Companies typically pay import duties as soon as their goods arrive at the border, but the complete customs review that follows can take nearly a year.) The government will continue to set up its new system, called CAPE, so that it can later refund older, finalized tariff payments.
NPR asked U.S. Customs and Border Protection about the scale of tariff refunds it expects to handle in the first phase, including the volume of claims the agency's new tool is prepared to handle on Monday. A CBP spokesperson in response said that CAPE was developed "to efficiently process refunds" and referred importers and brokers to the agency's updated tariff refund guidance.
So again we see the double dip on full display.
The "Importer Of Record" paid a tariff on the towels and car parts and bananas that you bought, they passed the bulk of that added cost right on to you, which kept their profits up where their shareholders demanded they be, and now they're going to be reimbursed for at least some of that money - and you will likely never see a dime of it rebound to you.
And the kicker: Don't expect the prices to go back down any time soon. Retailers now know that we'll pay their blood money, and they'll go on taking advantage until we figure out how to fight back and put a stop to it.
The U.S. Customs portal is ready to begin accepting refund requests from businesses that paid President Trump's tariffs before the Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional.
After weeks of waiting to hear how — or whether — the U.S. government might refund the tariffs struck down by the Supreme Court, businesses began applying to get their money back on Monday.
Imagine tens of thousands of business owners with their fingers hovering over laptops, ready to enter America's hottest new queue: the U.S. tariff refund portal.
"I sort of took the early-bird-catches-the-worm approach," said Sarah Wells, who logged on 10 minutes before the launch at 8 a.m. Eastern Time.
Wells sells imported backpacks and other products for nursing mothers. She said uploading records of the levies she's paid was "smooth and fast."
Refunds are expected in 60 to 90 days.
Monday marks just the first phase of refunds, so not all the goods imported under the illegal tariffs immediately qualify.
Still, this is a turning point for U.S. importers, who've waited for clarity ever since the U.S. Supreme Court declared most of President Trump's tariffs unconstitutional. The high court did not opine on the process of refunds, and government officials at first suggested the process could prove unwieldy.
Trump's tariffs likely cost you hundreds of dollars. Will you get a refund?
"Small businesses organized, spoke out, and won a major victory," said Main Street Alliance, which advocates for U.S. small businesses, in a statement. "Now, the federal government must follow through with a refund process that truly works for Main Street."
U.S. Customs has estimated that it owes a total of $166 billion in tariff refunds, and the agency's legal filings suggest that the initial phase would tackle the majority of affected imports. Last Tuesday, a Customs official told a judge that the vast majority of eligible importers signed up for electronic payments, as the agency is requiring, and that group is owed about $127 billion.
Will consumers see any of that money land in their pockets? Probably not, economics and legal experts say.
The cost of tariffs has been woven into the prices of many products in a way that can make it hard to separate out what customers ultimately paid. Often, manufacturers, suppliers, importers, retailers and shoppers all absorb costs along the way. And with tariffs landing on the heels of historic inflation, companies big and small have argued that they ate much of the cost to avoid spooking shoppers with higher prices.
How have prices changed in a year? NPR checked 114 items at Walmart
In fact, many retailers find themselves in a similar quandary because tariff refunds will go to whoever paid the actual customs bill. It's unclear how, or if, the refunds might trickle down to store owners who paid tariff surcharges to their suppliers.
"As a retailer, I didn't pay tariffs directly. However, I did pay them indirectly in the form of higher wholesale prices," said Joe Kimray, owner of B & W Hardware in North Carolina. Most of his products are either made abroad or use imported parts.
"I plan to have conversations with a number of manufacturers and hope that they will do the right thing and share some of the tariff refund money with us," he said. "I don't expect to get a direct refund check from anyone, but it could be even as simple as offering discounts on the wholesale cost of future product purchases."
Shoppers hoping to recoup their own tariff expenses have launched class-action lawsuits against several companies, including Costco and FedEx. The shipping giant has pledged to pass down any refunds it receives. Costco's CEO last month told investors the company would return shoppers' money through "lower prices and better values" and would be transparent about its plans.
U.S. Customs' initial phase of refunds focuses on tariff payments that haven't been finalized because they technically are still under federal review. (Companies typically pay import duties as soon as their goods arrive at the border, but the complete customs review that follows can take nearly a year.) The government will continue to set up its new system, called CAPE, so that it can later refund older, finalized tariff payments.
NPR asked U.S. Customs and Border Protection about the scale of tariff refunds it expects to handle in the first phase, including the volume of claims the agency's new tool is prepared to handle on Monday. A CBP spokesperson in response said that CAPE was developed "to efficiently process refunds" and referred importers and brokers to the agency's updated tariff refund guidance.
Apr 17, 2026
Apr 7, 2026
That Newsom Guy
California is now the 4th largest economy in the world.
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.’”
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.
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.
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.’”
Mar 30, 2026
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.
Feb 20, 2026
Affordability
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%.
Feb 17, 2026
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
Feb 2, 2026
Jan 19, 2026
About Those Tariffs
via google:
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.
- 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
Dec 15, 2025
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.
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.”
Nov 29, 2025
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:
Oct 16, 2025
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.
Sep 15, 2025
The Jobs Thing
Unemployment
+ Inflation
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.
Get a curated selection of 10 of our best stories in your inbox every weekend.
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.”
+ 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.
Get a curated selection of 10 of our best stories in your inbox every weekend.
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.”
Sep 5, 2025
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!?!"
Aug 15, 2025
Jul 18, 2025
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.
Jul 13, 2025
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.
May 27, 2025
Apr 30, 2025
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?
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