A Few Free Snippets:
The Consumer Economy
Nonfarm Payrolls (PAYEMS), 159.53M +256K, (+0.16% m/m)
Durable Goods, New Orders (DGORDER), $285B -3.3B, (-1.17% m/m)
It was Payrolls Friday, and the establishment survey (PAYEMS) surprised to the upside. The household survey was even stronger (CE16OV +478k +0.30%). This surprise result caused a large amount of fuss – long yields shot higher, and risk assets mostly dropped. Was it just “No More Cuts For You”? Maybe it was. While this isn’t fantastic (annualized, the payrolls change is just +1.92%), it is not recessionary – payrolls typically contract during recessions.
The “With a Disability” reading remained largely unchanged this week; total population disability fell 0.01% (-2000) to “just” 34.84 million. Here’s a big-picture look (yearly chart) at what the DeathVax(tm) has done to the population 16 and over. Rough math: about +5 million have been newly disabled since Safe & Effective was mandated (by Zients et al, 2021) across the US. The mandating institutions are baffled, of course.
Durable Goods orders (a dollar amount) contracted this month. Given our current inflation rate, this value should rise every month, but it has been bouncing lower since the high back in late 2023. This hints at a recession.
Credit & Rates
Fed Balance Sheet (WALCL), 6.854T +1.1B, (+0.02% w/w), (prior -0.49% w/w)
Total Bank Credit (TOTBKCR), 17.9T -24.2B, (-0.13% w/w);
30 Year Mortgage Rate (MORTGAGE30US); 6.93% +2 bp
10 Year Treasury (DGS10); 4.77% +17 bp
Bank credit contracted and is now below Dec 2024 levels. That’s deflationary.
“Democracy”
SHOCKING: Facebook Makes a U-Turn and Removes All Censorship! [Jan 8] (source – aussie17); “Coincidentally, Mark Zuckerberg announced this change less than 24 hours after Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense requested the U.S. Supreme Court to hear their censorship lawsuit against Facebook, possibly signaling a shift in approach.”
Trudeau To Be Humanely Euthanized [Jan 6] (source – babylonbee);
Notorious Grooming Gang Votes To Not Investigate Itself [Jan 11] (source – babylonbee);
See: picture of the House of Commons.
Dave’s Discussion
My Google Trends Fearporn Metric ™ is suggesting we might get more fires, and maybe more drones going forward. Everything else – even the super-scary HMPV (which has those Chinese hospitals “overflowing”) – remains a nothingburger by comparison. Drones even outweigh the flu. Poor Hotez, his shrieking didn’t even move the needle.
So – why did “the fires” happen? A friend of mine observed that a single “who benefits” calculation isn’t necessarily the best framing. More likely, there are a coalition of people who derive benefits in different ways from the “fires”. Now, who might that be?