Via Calculated Risk: On Friday at 8:30 AM ET, the BLS will release the employment report for November. The consensus is for 500 thousand jobs added, and for the unemployment rate to decrease to 6.7%. First, there are a wide range of estimates. For example, from Merrill Lynch economists: “We look for November jobs report
Good news. Cases in the US third wave appear to be peaking: Both cases and hospitalisations are seeing a flattening curve. Deaths will climb for a few more weeks. All regions bar the north east have improved: Cases are falling where lockdowns are strongest, as you’d expect. There must be an asterisk over this data
From a recent speech by Janet Yellen, incoming US Treasury Secretary: Extreme economic events have often challenged existing views of how the economy works and exposed shortcomings in the collective knowledge of economists. To give two well-known examples, both the Great Depression and the stagflation of the 1970s motivated new ways of thinking about economic
Via BofA: Fiscal cliff economics • Many pandemic-aid programs in the CARES Act are set to expire at the end of the year without action from Congress. • The expiration of federal UI programs—PUA and PEUC—alone could be a drag of 1.5pp in 1Q. Cutoff of other provisions will be additional headwinds. • We expect
Sadly the pandemic is about to enter its next dire phase. Cases are still surging along with hospitalisations and, as they flounder, deaths: Smoothed doesn’t look any better: The mortality rate has probably bottomed now as the death lag closes: El Trumpo‘s revenge is about to enter its final dark days as the economy remains
This is a classic for the Murdoch haters out there. The Fox News Frankenstein has come back to eat it: [email protected] daytime ratings have completely collapsed. Weekend daytime even WORSE. Very sad to watch this happen, but they forgot what made them successful, what got them there. They forgot the Golden Goose. The biggest difference
El Trumpo doesn’t miss a trick. At Reuters: As President Donald Trump seeks to discredit last week’s election with baseless claims of voter fraud, his team has bombarded his supporters with requests for money to help pay for legal challenges to the results: “The Left will try to STEAL this election!” reads one text. But
So far, US institutions have done well. But there are worrying signs that El Trumpo is hanging on. Via Nine: President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer has confirmed proceedings have begun to sue over alleged “fraudulent ballots”, claiming people will be “shocked” by the findings. Rudy Giuliani tweeted that the Trump campaign has “sued to invalidate
Earlier this year, the Economic Policy Institute released research proving that the United States’ temporary skilled visa scheme (H-1B) has been ruthlessly exploited by employers to undercut American wages. The analysis was based on the Department of Labor’s Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) survey, which constructs a distribution of wages for each occupation in a specific
It was an extraordinary outpouring of US election guff in the MSM on the weekend. Feel some pity for your humble blogger because I had to read it all. Our media is has become a kind of squawking parlour of mediocrity chock full of self-promoters, narrow identities and, above all, siloed viewpoints that are too
How will the Biden Administration fight the virus? The first point to make is he can’t do anything until January 20 and by then, I suspect, two things will have happened. First, El Trumpo will have made the third wave as bad as he possibly can. The anger of the narcissistic, would-be tyrant cannot be
Via Calculated Risk: On Friday at 8:30 AM ET, the BLS will release the employment report for October. The consensus is for 600 thousand jobs added, and for the unemployment rate to decrease to 7.6%. • Decennial Census: The decennial Census will subtract 147,311 temporary jobs. • ADP Report: The ADP employment report showed a gain of 365,000 private sector jobs, well below
Thankfully it appears that Donald El Trumpo is going to fail in his bid to steal the US election. But the attempt throws up an interesting question. What kind of leader is he and where does he fit in the history of political ideology? We know that El Trumpo is a classic populist. That is,
As if the American people have not suffered enough now they must endure El Trumpo’s virus revenge as cases, hospitalisations and deaths all skyrocket: The moving averages are not pretty: As the mortality rate bottoms out: I have every confidence that EL Trumpo will spend his last few months in office aiming to make this
Joe Biden is likely to win a close-fought US election. It is no great surprise to see the race tighter than expected. Trump is a formidable campaigner in the final days and Democrats were seriously hamstrung by their sense of responsibility regarding the virus. The senate was always going to be close. Most importantly, US
Fresh from El Trumpo: This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. So our goal now is to ensure the integrity for the good of this nation, this is a very big moment, this
I’m watching Fox News live because it will tell us quickly if Trump is close enough to launch his coup.
He’s on a roll nationally: Especially in the battleground states: Trump’s crucial wins in Florida and Pennsylvania have tightened: Betting is unmoved: Probably sensibly. But if you’re looking for a clean result then El Trumpo will disappoint, at Axios: President Trump has told confidants he’ll declare victory on Tuesday night if it looks like
How bad is the US virus? Bad: It looks no better smoothed: Where there has been some improvement is the mortality rates: Hospitalisations have fallen as a ratio of cases versus both first and second waves. Deaths lag by a month so that ratio is likely to bottom here and begin to rise again. There
Latest polls. At the headline: Battlegrounds: Betting: What if the polls are as wrong this week as they were in 2016? Biden wins, by 538: With the virus still gutting Trump’s interior heartland, it looks over for the White House: More interesting is the senate which has a less complete overlap between swing states and
More bad news for El Trumpo overnight with The Economist endorsing Joe Biden: Our cover this week sets out why, if we had a vote, it would go to Joe Biden. The country that elected Donald Trump in 2016 was unhappy and divided. The country he is asking to re-elect him is more unhappy and
Ther latest poll averages have Biden still cruising to a win at the headline level: And battleground states: Plus betting markets: The Economist has also declared its polling for a Democratic senate: We’re all jaded about polls. Watch the below video from FiveThirtyEight. It captures what happened to 2016 polls and how they’ve reformed their
The latest polling averages are better El Trumpo: Battleground states have closed the gap a little: Betting is unimpressed: 538 sees an even larger landslide: Probably rightly. There is always a late swing to the incumbent but the gap remains to large and the virus resurgence cannot help El Trumpo: He only has until next
This is not and will not cheer markets. Obviously, El Trumpo’s internal polling is saying the same thing as everybody else’s. Big problems and discrepancies with Mail In Ballots all over the USA. Must have final total on November 3rd. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 26, 2020 As I noted yesterday, El Trumpo is
As El Trumpo heads for the scrapheap of history, we have all been waiting for him to throw his final tantrum. Some last Hail Mary attempt to wrest the election from the virus that has killed his presidency. We were right to expect so, the toxic narcissist will always exact his revenge if publically humiliated.
Via The Economist: By the time covid-19 took off in America, the presidential primaries were already wrapping up. However, some later-voting states creaked under a historic load of postal ballots. In primary elections in June, 21% of absentee ballots in New York City were rejected, mainly for hiccups like missing signatures. Such a rate in the
I know it’s PR but…well…it’s Borat: The news is appropriate enough: [Rudi] Giuliani went to the hotel room thinking he was being interviewed about the Trump administration’s COVID-19 response. The young woman is flirtatious with him and invites him to the bedroom, which is rigged with hidden cameras. Giuliani then asks for her phone number
Via RealClear some movement to the incumbent at the headline: Battlegrounds not so much: Betting still all over the joint: No gap closure at FiveThirtyEight: An embarrassingly Trump worshipping Zero Hedge makes a big deal of registrations: Last week, we published an article detailing a warning from JPMorgan’s top quant Marko Kolanvoci to all those expecting
The latest polls do not offer much comfort to El Trumpo. Headline: Battleground states: Betting odds are volatile again: There usually a late swing back to the incumbent in every election. Nate Silver now sees a landslide: Indeed, the polls will need to be historically wrong for Trump to be re-elected: The senate remains tight:
