The job market, inflation and tariffs

Christ, that's depressing. Who was it in here who posted a recent AI generated social media "post-game report" from an official Washington Post account about a college basketball game that had the two teams involved and the winning team right, but was wrong about every other details in the text: wrong final score (not even close, and was a score that never occurred during the entire game), erroneous info about player performances, a bizarre generic photo of two random people on a basketball court that you could tell from the background was taken in a college arena that wasn't associated with either of the teams that played in this game.

Bezos has done to the Post what Musk has done to Twitter. But the loss of the Post is far more damaging.

 

From 'nutter's link

Several former editors said it appeared the paper was seeking to compete more with such specialized publications as Politico and Punchbowl rather than The New York Times. And numerous Post reporters and editors blamed their chief executives under Bezos — first Fred Ryan, a former Politico CEO — and then publisher and CEO Will Lewis, the former chief executive of the Wall Street Journal and a top executive at the British Telegraph and at Rupert Murdoch's London newspaper division.​

​

I've never seen the word "specialized" use as a synonym for "click-baity" before.

 

January is typically an up month because of the holiday hangover. Orders are higher because retail needs to restock after the holidays and production is higher because typically there are more production days than December (it's a month over month survey).

It was down 10 months in a row before this so...

 

This story wasn't even mentioned on the national evening news. Nor was there any mention of Trump trying to overturn the 2020 election. Top story last 3 days was Samantha Guthrie's mom going missing. Story doesn't even qualify as national news much less top story.

 

Small local musical instrument business has to close 1 of its 3 locations due to tariffs and uncertainty.

https://www.ksl.com/article/51443393/riverton-music-to-close-location-over-tariff-inflation-concerns

 

I never heard of the woman, much less her mother.

 

Serves 'em right for destroying the greatest American President ever,Dick Nixon!
-Sgt.Spiro Agnew Brooks,(Retired),Maryland State Police.

 

You know, for all those people complaining about inflation and how bad the economy was under Biden, they're gonna learn.

Anyway, last month was the highest number of layoff announcements since 2009. Which, having entered the job market around then, was not great. Biden meanwhile, had a fantastic economy but instead we had people complaining about not being able to live below their means,

https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/05/economy/us-jobs-data-layoffs-hiring?utm_source=business_ribbon

 

A favorite community radio station offers the following bumper sticker as a somewhat sarcastic pledge drive gift:

 

"Fantastic economy" is a strong description when the inflation is as high as it was through much of the Biden term. And I assume the inflation was in no small part due to the cash handouts the gov't was making, including to people who were able to maintain their job and income through COVID. Which is a bit absurd since if you were able to maintain your income during COVID, you had more money than ever even before receiving the gov't handouts because your expenses would also have been down (less driving, less going out, no international vacations, etc.)

 

********ing hell. This is really bad.

Bessent basically just confirmed in Congressional testimony that Trump may criminally investigate Warsh if he doesn't lower rates to Trump's liking.

Folks, this shit is a 5 alarm fire.

 

This is the actual quote. It will probably get lost in the firehose, but it's very very bad news.

 

This country has been mid-70s burning Bronx tenements under both Trump regimes.

 

https://bsky.app/profile/justinwolfers.bsky.social/post/3me5d4e235n2r

Chart not uploading from my phone so the link is what you'll get. But the chart shows that Kevin Warsh is an inflation hawk when Democrats are in office and an inflation dove when Republicans are. What a great thing to have a partisan hack in charge of monetary policy.

 

Looks to me like a generally hawkish position, independent from government. The swing to dovish usually coincides with economic downturns or problems (GFC, pandemic, Ukraine), although his latest swing looks out of order.

 

So, he's planning to lower interest rates, while 10ns of billons of US treasuries are being disposed of by European funds.