gehringer_2

and the funny part is, conventional wisdom is that it's whoever is in the White House that constantly jawbones the Fed to keep the pedal to the metal all the time for the sake of the next election. But the party in power has lost the White House in 2 out of 3 elections since ZIRP anyway.

yeah - saw another quote that they are supposed to be doing $95B/month by Sept. I'll believe it when I see it. It wouldn't be so bad if it was a mixed portfolio, but since it's mostly/all(?) MBS, you can't just dump all those without driving mortgage rates higher, and there is political pain in that, which means they will want to put it off.

yeah - I think this aptly illustrates the definition of a pose vs a conviction.

Sure. I wrote the K part initially about Carpenter and added Meadows to it without thinking.

Of course it is. She was wrong place, wrong time. I don't know who was giving her advice but any American that didn't get out of Russia when Ukraine was starting to heat up wasn't getting good advice.

He and Carpenter both with pretty dramatic recent reductions in K rate also. SSS anomaly, or something in the water in Toledo?

But if the fed pushes to a yield curve inversion, the demand for short term loans falls, (who needs a short term loan if a long term one is cheaper?), so the effectiveness of the short term rate hikes is undercut. Conveniently enough, a little fiscal contraction could be just the thing, and Manchin's new deal is going to increase corporate and some financial operator's taxes (elimination of carried interest deductions). If that become effective Jan 1 that (and its anticipation) could be contractive faster than anything the Fed does with interest rates before then.

there is a paradox here, which is that the future economic activity rubber really hits the road with longer term rates. Most money committed to expansion of economy activity is longer term. But long term rates are not directly controlled by the Fed. They are based on market expectation for future inflation. So paradoxically, strong action by the Fed that is seen as counter inflationary can actually depress long term rates, and make those very moves less effective at slowing an overheated economy. Right now long term rates are staying stubbornly low. Let's see if they start floating up any starting tomorrow or not. Of course there is also a direct effect on money supply when the Fed raises short term rates, and the Fed has other actions it can take in the bond market that can increase or decrease money supply so they have some levers in spite of the possibility of paradoxical interest rate psychology. But in the short run it is the psychology that matters because money supply moves by the fed take many months to actually effect economic activity for their own sake.

Sadly, a lot of reporting coming out of Russia is to the effect that Putin still believes he is winning and that time is on Russia's side because he will hold out longer than the West will. If that doesn't change, there seems little hope of him agreeing to any acceptable negotiation. There is a line to walk here and of course no-one knows exactly where it is. On one hand, we can argue for a maximalist, faster, stronger response to force Russia into a bad enough position sooner on the hope that gets a serious Putin to the table with less damage to Ukraine. OTOH, you have the argument that maybe you trip Russia into a full mobilization and suddenly make life much more difficult where you could have just bleed him out by calibrating the pressure applied so he just cooks himself like a frog in increasingly hot water and one day the Russian army in Ukraine simply has no fight left. Like any war, no options are risk free, and in ten years we will be able to see all the things we are doing wrong.

I know your trolling a bit here because it's not a very apt comparison. It's not about Putin winning in and of itself. The future of 40 million people don't hang on the balance of what happens to a Russian crook and a stoner (maybe) American minor league roundball player. The reason Putin can't be allowed to win in Ukraine is those 40 million, and the IDK how many million more in Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania & Finland etc., that still have to live next to Russia. The reason it doesn't matter if he wins in this trade is because the 3 people in involved don't matter very much to the world order but do to their families, which is enough.

Toledo pages show Barnes and Norris added today but no removals - so somebody's out.

Tiger rebuild part Deux.

P. Meadows 4/4 HR tonight for Erie. 277/329/477 for July

this is an odd chart. From a Peter Coy column in the NYT. M4 went through a huge weird spike coming out of the pandemic. Supposedly M4 weights cash more heavily so possibly all the recovery money? Whatever. It was both huge and very short term. As Coy noted, if you agree with Milton Friedman than inflation is always and only about money supply, there's a lead. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/27/opinion/gross-domestic-product-income.html

yeah - I was sorry to see that. Figured he was probably a better coach when Tucker was making more.....🤔

LOL - they won't get Romney's vote on carried interest!

the only hope for this court is that somebody dies, or the Chief can pry Barrett or Kavanaugh away from Alito and Thomas, but TBH, it's never clear how much the Chief wants to. It's hard to know if the Chief has actually grown concerned about the quality of law the court is making, or just it's public image.

there were certain points where Boyd could get a little extra on the FB when he wanted it and command that good slow curve. When he had both those things working, you could say he was a pitcher with good stuff. But he he really couldn't maintain both those pitches working consistently together. The max FB tended to fall back to 92 and the command wasn't always there. I suppose this is the way it goes for a lot of guys. The have good stuff at their best, but are not at their best enough to be winners. We certainly learned that with Armando Galarraga. On days when he could command his best fastball and best slider all day, his stuff was no-hitter quality, but he couldn't do that very often.

so much for the guy that had trade value....

and it was deja vu all over again with Mize.

Skubal out. Right move.

yup

well, someone on this team ought to get mad. Javy nonchalants a throw last night, Harold drops on today,....

this is an interesting way to put it. I would expand it some... Coming out of the early 20th cent you had the classic ideological conflict set up between Marxism and Capitalism, and early American and European progressives had a lot of sympathy with communist/socialist revolutions. Probably right into the 50's and maybe the early 60's there was still a feeling on the left that you didn't have to fight capitalism directly because it was dying anyway. Even Kennedy talked about 'the long twilight struggle' against communism in a way that practically assumed the battle would be lost eventually. The fierceness of protecting those dominos was based on a lack of confidence that any domino that fell could ever be stood back up. But then came the 70s and the economic stagnation in the semi-nationalized Euro zone and the obvious and growing signs of collapse and rot inside the Communist world. By the 1990s, to the surprise of all of us that grew up under the pessimism of the post WWII era, it was Socialism/Marxism that was left on the ash-heap of history. Totalitarianism certain still stood in places, but any idea it was based on evangelism for a new economics instead of ordinary tyranny was long gone. Now interestingly enough, in Europe, this didn't seem to create a crises in political/economic governance. England and Scandinavia moderated the worst socialist excesses that were dragging down their economies and Europe largely carried on with with understanding that capitalism was here to stay but that things like government social welfare, public investment, labor unions, regulation and public input to corporate boards had to be part of future. The situation in the US was much different. We got the worst excesses of a less regulated triumphalist capitalism, a period of insufficient social investment, and argument over whether the government should even have any role in social services. So that has left the American left in sort of in a quandary. You can't preach classic industrial socialism, it's too thoroughly discredited (not that Bernie didn't try!) but in the absence of some easy to define alternative like socialism, the US left doesn't seem to know how to articulate a vision or program to get to the better form of capitalism most of Europe has already started to figure out. Maybe as you say - they are too radicalized to even want just that or I guess it's just too mundane/boring/lost in minutia. Elizabeth Warren has tried arguing for capitalism with reform, didn't get very far. If the left doesn't want that, whatever else it is they are selling or trying to sell on economics remains a mystery. Rhetoric about what you don't like (i.e. railing against corps and the rich) only goes so far on economics, you have to propose the vision of how to get to what you want. With no understandable, 'marketable', economic reform vision to sell, the US left has devolved mostly into throwing isolated economic ideas at the wall (tuition forgiveness), identity politics and its own sexual culture war, and not much of that charges up the electorate. I think if the dems do well in '22 they will have mostly revulsion to Trump and the GOP overreach on abortion to thank rather than that they found any magic of their own. Heaven knows that should be enough, but it still doesn't say much to recommend the Dems on a programmatic basis.