China on Thursday announced the “indefinite” suspension of all activity under a China-Australia Strategic Economic Dialogue amid strained relations between the two countries, its state economic planner said on Thursday. The news caused the Aussie Dollar to fall sharply, dropping as low as 0.7701 vs the US dollar vs. Wednesday’s $0.7747. “Recently, some Australian Commonwealth […]

Paul writes me: I remember you wrote an article about the intersection of cryptocurrency and philanthropy, so if you haven’t heard about it yet you’d probably be interested in the new “Save Thousands of Lives” NFT being sold by a nonprofit we funded. They run programs in India to teach new moms to take care of […]

Authored by Patricia McCarthy via AmericanThinker.com, In 1949, sometime after the publication of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World (1931), who was then living in California, wrote to Orwell.  Huxley had briefly taught French to Orwell as a student in high school at Eton. Huxley generally praises Orwell’s novel, which to many seemed […]

Humans readily respond to changing market conditions in various ways when it comes to soaring commodity prices. For instance, as random length lumber futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange hit a record $1,640 on Wednesday, there has been a multi-month explosion of internet searches for people who want to learn how to make lumber.  Genius […]

Authored by Richard Bernstein, RealClearInvestigations, The mass shooting in Atlanta on March 16, which took the lives of six Asian women among the eight victims, appears to be a one-off event – the violent act of a deeply troubled 21-year-old man who, according to what he told the police, was trying to wipe away sexual […]

Progress politicians have been pitching free public housing for years as a cure for housing, wealth, and all sorts of other inequalities. Several West Coast cities have implemented housing first initiatives, with taxpayers shelling out more than one billion dollars in the last half-decade. Years later, the attempt to break the homeless in perpetuity hasn’t worked […]

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times, A Democratic candidate who lost her bid during last weekend’s Texas congressional special election sounded the alarm that the 2022 midterms “could be a major setback” for the Democratic Party. During the special election, two Republicans – and no Democrats – advanced in the runoff as the top two vote-getters […]

The rate of seniors collecting Social Security benefits has plunged to the lowest level in a decade, which Bloomberg suggests may be due to the disproportionate number of COVID-19 deaths among the elderly. According to the Social Security Administration, the number of people who took retirement benefits rose by just 900,000 to 46.4 million in […]

Authored by Nicholas Wade via the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (emphasis ours), The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted lives the world over for more than a year. Its death toll will soon reach three million people. Yet the origin of pandemic remains uncertain: The political agendas of governments and scientists have generated thick clouds of […]

Alongside Interstate 71, there sits thousands of Ford Super Duty trucks, parked in rows and waiting on parts. The scene is the latest sign of an ongoing semiconductor crisis that has stung not only the entire auto industry – but Ford specifically, who was the latest auto manufacturer to slash its expectations for full year production as […]

Authored by Bowen Xiao via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours), As more and more states start easing pandemic restrictions, restaurants large and small are grappling with a widespread problem: hiring employees. Mark Fox, owner of The Ragtrader & Bo Peep Cocktail and Highball Store in New York City on April 29, 2021. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch […]

by Calculated Risk on 5/05/2021 08:15:00 PM Note: Inventory is down sharply in the Northwest almost everywhere except Seattle. And inventory is low in Seattle too, but was even lower a year ago. Remember – sales slumped in April 2020, so the year-over-year sales comparisons are crazy. The Northwest Multiple Listing Service reported Brokers detect […]

Enlarge this image Qieer Wang/NPR Today’s show is adapted from the episode “Eat the Rich” from the NPR podcast Invisibilia. In the wake of the killing of George Floyd, Vermont college student Moirha Smith decided she was done waiting for reparations for all the harm that had been done to Black people from slavery up […]

by Calculated Risk on 5/05/2021 04:54:00 PM President Biden has set two vaccinations goals to achieve by July 4th: 1) 70% of the population over 18 has had at least one dose of vaccine, and 2) 160 million Americans fully vaccinated. According to the CDC, on Vaccinations 1) 56.7% of the population over 18 has […]

1. Additional problems with central bank digital currencies. 2. Nicholas Wade on where Covid-19 really came from.  And commentary from Elad.  Original link is updated here. 3. Police vaccination rates are low. 4. “Travel agencies in Thailand are selling coronavirus “vaccine tours” to the United States, as some wealthy Thais grow impatient awaiting mass inoculations […]

ADP private nonfarm change at 742K below consensus of 800K (Bloomberg). Figure 1: Private nonfarm payroll employment from BLS October release (black), Bloomberg consensus for April as of 5/5 (teal square), ADP November release (red), all on log scale. Source: BLS, ADP via FRED, Bloomberg, and author’s calculations.

Some recent research from the agency Mr. Trump found too meddlesome, and Mr. Mulvaney tried to dispatch (i.e., the USDA’s Economic Research Service): Economic Crises and U.S. Agricultural Exports WILLIAM M. LIEFERT ,  LORRAINE MITCHELL ,  AND  RALPH SEELEY ERR-282, April 26, 2021 Reforming Market Access in Agricultural Trade: Tariff Removal and the Trade Facilitation Agreement JAYSON BECKMAN ERR-280, April […]

by Calculated Risk on 5/05/2021 02:29:00 PM Note: I’m tracking data for many local markets around the U.S. I think it is especially important to watch inventory this year. From the DMAR: Monthly Indicators, April 2021Total Residential Units Sold in April 2021 were 5,088, up 28.5% from 3,961 in April 2020.Active Residential Listings in April […]

Here is the link, it was very good rapport I thought, I enjoyed doing this very much.

By Lambert Strether of Corrente. Bird Song of the Day The Strange Weaver has exactly one sample. It’s very pretty! * * * #COVID19 At reader request, I’ve added this daily chart from 91-DIVOC. The data is the Johns Hopkins CSSE data. Here is the site. I feel I’m engaging in a macabre form of […]

As the Group of Seven (G7) summit is now wrapping up in London, it’s been clear that a ‘united front’ for confronting China has been a controversial topic high on the discussion list. For starters it appears that an entire lengthy Tuesday night meeting was spent among G7 representatives exploring the ways China coerces “partner” countries into […]

Update (1325ET): Responding to the Oversight Board’s decision, former President Trump said in a statement: “What Facebook, Twitter, and Google have done is a total disgrace and an embarrassment to our Country. Free Speech has been taken away from the President of the United States because the Radical Left Lunatics are afraid of the truth, […]

Authored by Sven Henrich via NorthmanTrader.com, What a circus. I imagine there’s a big sign in every Fed building in America: Don’t drop, fragile, handle with care. Janet Yellen, while no longer in a Fed building, committed the cardinal sin of pointing out the obvious yesterday: Rates may have to be raised in response to […]

Popular British video sharing website “LiveLeak,” known for footage of war, politics, and many other world events usually censored on other video websites, like YouTube, was dissolved on Wednesday. LiveLeak was founded in 2006 and was launched into the spotlight in 2007 after the unauthorized filming and execution of Saddam Hussein were posted on the site.  […]

Authored by Robert Aro via The Mises Institute, Last Wednesday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell showed how simple questions do not always get simple answers. When speaking to the media after the latest Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting, some difficult questions were asked. So much so, Powell had to repeat one question to himself, […]

Iran’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is stoking tensions once again as the Iranian foreign ministry is engaged in continued ‘indirect’ nuclear talks with the US in Vienna, early this week releasing a short video clip that features an imagined missile attack on the Capitol building in Washington D.C. The footage aired on Iranian […]

by Calculated Risk on 5/05/2021 12:10:00 PM Note: This is even lower than housing economist Tom Lawler’s projection, see: Lawler: The Dismal Demographics of 2020. Demographics are still positive for housing, but nothing like the projections from a decade ago. The Census projections were dropping all decade: 2014 Census projections for April 2020: 334.5 million […]

Authored by Michael Lebowitz via RealInvestmentAdvice.com, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” reads the first sentence of the bible. Later in the book of Genesis, God created cycles. “Then Joseph said to Pharaoh, “Both of these dreams have the same meaning. God is telling you what will happen soon. The seven […]

Here is the audio, video, and transcript, I found it a very substantive and also illuminating episode.  Carpenter is very, very smart and also very well-informed historically.  Here is part of the summary: Daniel Carpenter is one of the world’s leading experts on regulation and the foremost expert on the US Food and Drug Administration. […]

A month ago, The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board stated yet another true but unpopular fact: “Continuing government bans on eviction and foreclosure are doing more harm than good.” The CDC invoked the 1944 Public Health Service Act, which allows the agency to take measures to prevent the spread of communicable diseases between states. People […]

Authored by Omid Malekan, Like most things, the undulations of the crypto markets are cyclical and meme-based. But thanks to the blockchain’s elimination of many of the frictions of the traditional financial system, the cycles happen faster. Take the simple fact that crypto markets trade 24/7, while most traditional markets do not. In any normal […]

The New York Times just announced that in the first quarter since former President Donald Trump left office, digital subscriptions have slowed ‘sharply’ despite revenue rising 6.6%, according to the Wall Street Journal. In its slowest growth since the second quarter of 2019, the leftist outlet signed up 167,000 new subscribers for its core news […]

by Calculated Risk on 5/05/2021 10:04:00 AM (Posted with permission). The March ISM® Services index was at 62.7%, down from 63.7% last month. The employment index increased to 58.8%, from 57.7%. Note: Above 50 indicates expansion, below 50 contraction. From the Institute for Supply Management: April 2021 Services ISM® Report On Business® Economic activity in […]

Yves here. Thanks in large measure to the diligent reporting of the Health Care Renewal blog, as well as more recently the deep digging by Eileen Applebaum and Rosemary Batt on private equity’s major incursions into healthcare, we’ve been able to keep tabs on the corporatization of medicine and its detrimental effects on the quality […]

by Calculated Risk on 5/05/2021 08:22:00 AM From ADP: Private sector employment increased by 742,000 jobs from March to April according to the April ADP® National Employment ReportTM. Broadly distributed to the public each month, free of charge, the ADP National Employment Report is produced by the ADP Research Institute® in collaboration with Moody’s Analytics. […]

We managed to set free this weekend’s MiB with Michael Lewis a few days early. A quick funny story about our conversation: I know him fairly well, having interviewed him 4 or 5 times for an hour or so each time; We also spent a few hours tossing some back at the bar at the […]

Goldman Sachs is the latest to call an end to remote work. Goldman Sachs wants its workers back in the office, including its Manhattan headquarters, next month.Brendan McDermid/ReutersManhattan calling #styln-signup .styln-signup-wrapper { max-width: calc(100% – 40px); width: 600px; margin: 20px auto; padding-bottom: 20px; border-bottom: 1px solid #e2e2e2; } Goldman Sachs has joined JPMorgan Chase in […]

In this article ETH.CM= After weeks of teasing his drawings on Twitter, entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk announced Wednesday he’s launching his first NFT collection, “VeeFriends,” a series of 10,255 character tokens available for purchase via the cryptocurrency ethereum. Nonfungible tokens are a type of digital asset created to track ownership of a virtual item using blockchain technology. […]

My jaw just about hit the floor when I read this paper. It is commonly believed that psychic ability, like many mental and physical traits, runs in families. This suggests the presence of a genetic component. If such a component were found, it would constitute a biological marker of psychic ability and inform environmental or […]

100 year-old enormous fresh water fish caught in Detroit River Boing Boing (resilc) !!!!! Scientists Are Relocating Nuisance Beavers to Help Salmon Smithsonian Magazine Drones show California’s great white sharks are closer — and more common — than you think Los Angeles Times This Unappealing Beer Offers a Taste of Climate Change TreeHugger Bugging out: […]

CalPERS likes to think that all that matters is if it can control perceptions in Sacramento. If Dan Walters’ latest column is any indication, CalPERS is losing that battle. For those of you outside California, Walters has been the most influential commentator in Sacramento for decades. His view skew somewhat conservative, but he regularly calls […]

Yves here. As someone who 1. hates being spied on (hence my fondness for tech antiques) and 2. has no patience, when I hear Lambert say, for instance, that he had to spend an hour on his new Apple machine (emergency acquisition due to sudden death of one of his workhorse devices) turning off snooping […]

El anuncio plantea interrogantes sobre el destino de su fortuna. La pareja ayudó a crear Giving Pledge, pero gran parte del dinero de Microsoft aún no ha sido donado. Bill y Melinda Gates, dos de las personas más ricas del mundo, una pareja que reconfiguró la filantropía y la salud pública con la fortuna que […]

Here is a new paper by Donna K. Ginther and Shulamit Kahn: This study uses data from Academic Analytics to examine gender differences in promotion to associate professor in economics. We found that women in economics were 15% less likely to be promoted to associate professor after controlling for cumulative publications, citations, grants and grant […]

Multiple international reports on Tuesday revealed that Saudi Arabia’s powerful intelligence chief traveled to Damascus Monday to meet with his Syrian counterpart in what’s being seen as a major step toward detente. The two broke off relations since near the start of the war in 2011, especially as it became clear the Saudis were a […]

Yves here. Thomas Neuburger identifies some bona fide actors in the conservation/nature protection space as opposed to greenwashers. I am sure readers can add to his list. By Thomas Neuburger. Originally published at God’s Spies The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is one of those potentially game-changing solutions. The TPP is a trade agreement designed to promote […]

Primarily as an exercise, I thought about that question for a while, and here is part of my answer in a Bloomberg column: If you know you are being watched, what exactly do you wish to buy more of? I would bet on defense stocks to rise, whether or not there is much we can […]

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times, If we need a date when the West started to go seriously wrong, let’s start with Rome in the early 5th century… In 2020, we saw the enshrinement of techno-feudalism – one of the overarching themes of my latest book, Raging Twenties. In lightning speed, the techno-feudalism virus […]

The leaked content of a fiery anti-China speech and secretive briefing to elite military personnel by one of Australia’s top generals has landed on the front pages of major newspapers from Sydney to Melbourne to London on Tuesday. The confidential address issued by Major-General Adam Findlay, who was then commander of Australia’s special forces and currently […]

Authored by John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute, “They were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don’t recognize them for what they are until it’s too late.” – Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children The U.S. government, in its pursuit of so-called monsters, […]