***** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)
Economic and Market Fare:
A modified McKelvey recession indicator with no false positives or false negatives since 1953 suggests we are in recession now.
......... The PMES recession indicator combines job vacancy rates with unemployment data. The indicator is the minimum of the McKelvey indicator—the difference between the 3-month trailing average of the unemployment rate and its minimum over the past 12 months—and a similar indicator constructed with the vacancy rate—the difference between the 3-month trailing average of the vacancy rate and its maximum over the past 12 months.
China Fare:
Quotes of the Week:
Waller: The Time Has Come
… I believe our patience over the past 18 months has served us well. But the current batch of data no longer requires patience, it requires action…
… Determining the pace of rate cuts and ultimately the total reduction in the policy rate are decisions that lie in the future. As of today, I believe it is important to start the rate cutting process at our next meeting. If subsequent data show a significant deterioration in the labor market, the FOMC can act quickly and forcefully to adjust monetary policy
Charts:
0:
As I highlighted last night and at the top of the thread, there is a meaningful amount of statistical noise in the jobs report, so it's important to smooth the data to distill the trend.
— Parker Ross (@Econ_Parker) September 6, 2024
Below is a longer time series of private-sector job growth with the CES benchmark revisions… pic.twitter.com/YTT7V1LN74
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
Radagast: The Cure for Climate Anguish
Geopolitical Fare:
Geopolitical Fare:
Wolfgang Streeck: Notes on the political economy of war
********** Johnstone: "Why Should I Care About Gaza?"
Condi Rice Calls for Turbo America, Almost Everyone Now is a Fascist, US/CAN vs. Mexico's Judicial Reforms, Marxist to Rawlsian Liberal Pipeline, Who Killed Pasolini?
When Donald Trump caved into pressure and gave the order to lob a few cruise missiles against Syrian Government targets, Bill Kristol excitedly remarked: “for the first time, he is acting presidential!”.
The unrelenting torrent of accusations leveled against Trump from 2016 to the present has flooded every single aspect of political life in the USA and beyond. But make no mistake, it was the perceived threat that he appeared to pose to the bipartisan consensus on foreign policy that made him Public Enemy #1 in the eyes of the governing elites. Think about it: the first thing that Congress did when Trump entered the White House was to take power out of his hands regarding US policy towards Russia. From the very first minute of his time in office, he was handcuffed to the established bipartisan policy that insisted that the Putin regime be overthrown, or at least, increasingly isolated.
Trump’s approach to China yielded different results back home because his administration’s approach was completely aligned with the established consensus that sought a tougher approach to Beijing. I’m sure that there was some criticism of Trump and his China policy, but I can’t think of any offhand and I doubt that most of you could either. The Americans have been seeking to “Pivot to East Asia” for some time now, and part of this pivot demanded a somewhat more belligerent tone towards the Chinese.
In 2016, Trump ran on Patrick Buchanan’s 1992 platform of less intervention abroad and more economic protectionism. This put the fear of God into the foreign policy blob as such a radical turn away from traditional policy would have upended decades of established norms and, in their collective view, eroded US power on the global stage. .......
Russiagate seems too good of a weapon for the Democrats to give up. Its initial appearance, beginning in 2016, dangerously raised tensions with nuclear-armed Russia. But in the midst of today’s escalating crisis in Ukraine, a Russiagate repeat recklessly raises risk to insane heights.
Lawrence: 'Kamala' and the self-deluding 'left.'
The semiology of flowers.
Many commentators have attempted to describe the astonishing devolution of Democratic Party politics into sheer marketing: Kamala Harris as product, “new and improved” like a laundry detergent or a frozen dinner. Vanessa Beeley comes up with “cartoon theatrics,” and it is as good as I have seen. In two words the British journalist captures from a useful distance the infantilism of the Harris-for-president campaign along with the Hollywoodization of American political culture.
I thought I had seen everything in this line until a few days ago, but in this, the most unserious political season of my lifetime, it is incautious to make any such assumption. There is always more, something worse, another step down into a sort of political nihilism that leaves the electorate stupefied as the imperium conducts its violent, illegal business. ......
********** Johnstone: Revolution Is Now
People are always asking me what we can do to fight the tyranny and depravity of the empire and create a healthy world.
“But what can we do?” they ask. “You always talk about the problems, but we need solutions! How do we solve the problems you keep pointing to?”
It’s especially common during US election season, because I tend to spend a lot of time pointing to the fraudulent nature of western electoral politics and saying Americans will never be able to vote their way out of their problems.
Which is of course fair. If I’m saying “Not that way, it’s a dead end,” it’s only fair that I should be asked which way actually leads to the exit.
Trouble is I talk about solutions all the time here, and I’m always practicing what I preach and leading by example; some people just can’t seem to hear what I’m saying. It goes in one ear and out the other, because I don’t have any solutions that are as easy and immediate as “Cast your vote for Donald Trump, he’ll fight the Deep State” or “Cast your vote for Kamala Harris, she’ll stop fascism.”
The truth of the matter is that in the here and now there are no easy and immediate solutions to the problems we face in our world. The system is far too deeply entrenched, and people are far too deeply indoctrinated with propaganda to be persuaded to fight against it right now.
And I emphasize the words “right now”. My solutions might not be easy or immediate, but unlike voting for Trump or Harris in November, they will actually work if put into practice in sufficient numbers.
An effective solution that we can all begin applying in the here and now is working to foment a revolutionary zeitgeist by spreading awareness of the depravity and deceit of the empire. The primary obstacle to real change is the fact that far too many people are far too brainwashed by propaganda to rise up against our rulers, so our first task is to begin working to wake people up out of that propaganda-induced coma so they can see how desperately real change is needed.
The tyrants won’t end their tyranny until they are forced to, and they can’t be forced to as long as enough people are propagandized into believing things are fine. That’s why so much energy goes into narrative control measures like mass media propaganda, censorship, government secrecy, the war on journalism, and Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation. They wouldn’t pour so much energy into protecting that part of the imperial machine if it wasn’t very vulnerable to attack.
So we attack it. We cultivate a habit of small acts of sedition, trying to do something every day to de-normalize the abuses of the empire in the eyes of the public.
Sci Fare:
Researchers found that people with upper gastrointestinal conditions were far more likely to develop Parkinson’s disease later in life
Pics of the Week:
i don't love that it's from Musk, but truth is truth, no matter whom the source:
The true size of countries without the distortions of the Mercator planisphere projection. pic.twitter.com/hwfUJlDkB3
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) September 8, 2024
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