Italian researchers have recently uncovered evidence suggesting that the Shroud of Turin, a linen cloth believed by many to be the burial shroud of Jesus Christ, may indeed date back to the time of Jesus. This finding adds a new layer to the long-standing debate over the authenticity of the Shroud, which has been the…
Category: Economics
FOMC Minutes Preview: Any Hints For Powell’s J-Hole Address?
FOMC Minutes Preview: Any Hints For Powell’s J-Hole Address?
Via Newsquawk,
JULY MEETING:
The FOMC left rates unchanged, but it made tweaks to its statement that appeared to leave the door open to a September rate cut. The Committee is now attentive to risks on both sides of its mandate, a change from the June statement, where it said it was ‘highly attentive’ to inflation risks. The statement said there has been ’some further progress’ towards its inflation goal, whereas in June it said there had been ‘modest’ progress.
And it now says that risks to achieving its employment and inflation goals continue to move into better balance, whereas in June it said it was moving ’towards’ better balance. The Fed did however reiterate that it does not expect that it will be appropriate to lower rates until it has gained greater confidence that inflation is moving sustainably towards target, suggesting that the Committee still wants to see favourable data before pivoting to rate cuts.
At his post-meeting press conference, Chair Powell revealed that there was a real discussion about the case for reducing rates at this meeting; a strong majority supported not moving (he later said that overwhelmingly’ policymakers felt it was not the time yet). The Fed Chair noted that the policy rate is clearly restrictive, and it is coming to the point where it will be appropriate to start rate cuts and dial back restrictions to support the continued progress of the economy. He added that the Fed does not need to be 100% focused on inflation given upside risks to prices have decreased while downside risks to employment mandate are real now, noting that the chances of a hard landing are low as the economy was neither overheating nor sharply weakening. A theme throughout Powell’s Q&A was that he tied any future move on the incoming data.
The Chair was coy on giving any specific nod to rate cuts, noting that it could reduce rates zero times this year, or even several – it all depended on incoming data.
COMMENTARY:
Recent Fed commentary has been focused on when the next rate cut will come, and generally, September seems on the table.
Members continue to stress the importance of data dependence, however, and how the balance of risks has shifted towards both sides of its dual mandate, rather than just the inflation side of the equation.
Highlighting this, Bostic (voter) recently stated that he is open to a September rate cut as inflation cools, adding that price pressures have eased, and therefore officials also need to be conscious of their mandate of maintaining full employment; Kashkari (2026 voter) noted the balance of risks has shifted more towards labor market and away from inflation side.
RECENT DATA:
Since the last FOMC meeting, data has been mixed, but some concerns surrounding the labor market and growth have diminished in recent weeks. As mentioned above, the Fed’s focus is now shifting more towards its dual mandate, not just inflation, and the recent inflation data continues to suggest that the Fed has got it under control. Highlighting this, the July PPI was cooler-than-expected across the board, while CPI was as forecasted (aside from core Y/Y, which was also shy of consensus). However, employment data has been more mixed: July’s NFP and ISM Manufacturing PMI disappointed expectations, stoking recessionary fears, and saw money markets at its peak price in 130bps of rate cuts by year-end (vs 66bps post-Fed); since then, the last two weekly initial jobless claims reports have come in beneath expectations, while retail sales were much better than forecast in July, helping to sooth the recent economic concerns, and push back against expectations for a larger 50bps rate cut from the Fed in September.
MINUTES:
The minutes will reveal the extent to which a rate reduction was considered at the July meeting, as well as officials’ views on the labour market and the subsequent impact on monetary policy.
However, as always, the minutes are stale by a couple of weeks.
Additionally, Chair Powell is due to speak at the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium (on Friday at 10:00EDT/15:00BST), which will likely overshadow the minutes, with traders likely to put greater weight on his remarks to gauge how the Fed may respond in September.
* * *
Bear in mind that Jackson-Hole has tended to be a ‘sell-the-news’ moment in recent years…
Tyler Durden
Wed, 08/21/2024 – 13:36
Bosnian janitor opens fire at school over labor dispute
A tragic incident took place on Wednesday morning when a gunman at a high school in Bosnia, who is believed to have been a former employee at the school, opened fire with an automatic weapon, leaving three employees killed. The shooting took place around 10:15 am in Sanski Most, which is located roughly 180 miles…
Russia-China partnership ‘yielding results’, Putin says
President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday that Russia’s economic and trade links with China are “yielding results” as he welcomed Chinese Premier Li Qiang to the Kremlin. Moscow has looked to Beijing as an economic lifeline since the Ukraine conflict began, with the two boosting trade to record highs as Russia faces heavy economic sanctions from […]
The post Russia-China partnership ‘yielding results’, Putin says appeared first on Insider Paper.
JACQUELINE TOBOROFF: New York City is the Left’s testing ground for turning illegal immigrants into voters
There is a very real chance that, if the Biden-Harris-Adams playbook succeeds, illegal immigrants will determine the future of our nation’s leadership.
HUMAN EVENTS: Is that it, Democrats?
The DNC is something arguably worse than bad: it’s dull.
Nolte: Obama Makes Penis Size Joke While Trashing Trump as ‘Childish’
Former President Barry Obama went mighty low by inferring former President Trump has a small penis during his speech on the second night of the issue and policy-free Democrat National Convention.
The post Nolte: Obama Makes Penis Size Joke While Trashing Trump as ‘Childish’ appeared first on Breitbart.
NewsWare’s Trade Talk: Wednesday, August 21 | NewsWare‘s Trade Talk
S&P Futures are pushing higher this morning due to a host of recent earnings releases. TOL & KEYS delivered earnings beats last night and TGT & ADI are higher after eps beats. After the bell today SNOW, A, ZM & URBN will be releasing and tomorrow morning NTES, BIDU, BJ & AAP are scheduled to report. After the close, Walmart indicated that it will be selling its 3.6B stake in JD.com. Later this morning the BLS will be announcing its labor market revisions. Fed Meeting Minutes are set to be released this afternoon. In Europe, markets are slightly higher. Oil prices are displaying an uneasy gain ahead of this morning’s stockpile report.
John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Great Crash, 1929: A Retrospective
Although John Kenneth Galbraith promoted socialism and Keynesianism, at least he was an entertaining writer. His book, The Great Crash, 1929, provides a readable history of the stock market crash that helped bring on the Great Depression.
RFK Jr. Can Save Liberalism…By Endorsing Trump
RFK Jr. Can Save Liberalism…By Endorsing Trump
Submitted by QTR’s Fringe Finance
“The Democratic Party positions itself as the party of liberty. Kamala Harris says that Americans should make personal decisions without the government telling them what to do. Tim Walz’s Golden Rule is ‘Mind your own damn business.’
In view of the censorship, surveillance, vaccine mandates, and the confederacy of fixers openly working to prevent me from getting on ballots, this is like the arsonist telling us he’s a firefighter. I am running to make America once again the land of liberty.”
On Tuesday, one of the big headlines to hit the wire was that RFK, Jr. could wind up dropping out of the race to support Donald Trump. The speculation came after this interview of Nicole Shanahan talking about how the DNC sabotaged their campaign and how they are considering joining forces with Donald Trump.
“There’s two options that we’re looking at and one is staying in, forming that new party, but we run the risk of a Kamala Harris and Waltz presidency because we draw more votes from Trump,” she says during the interview. “Or we walk away right now and join forces with with Donald Trump and explain to our base why we’re making this decision.”
Hilariously, the news comes just days after the left-wing propaganda machine Washington Post tried to pass off a story that RFK, Jr. had gone groveling to the Harris campaign in order to back them.
Upon seeing this headline last week, I contacted my sources in the RFK, Jr. campaign, which are extremely close to Mr. Kennedy and trustworthy enough that they helped set up my recent podcast with him.
Those sources told me that the reporting about Kennedy wanting Harris’ help was “a load of crap.” Instead, they informed me that a family member of RFK, Jr. had tried to convince him, at a wedding, to talk to Harris on the phone.
My source told me directly:
“…we were at a wedding and one of [RFK, Jr.’s] cousins was like ‘let me please put you on the phone with Kamala to just talk’ and then they didn’t want to have a phone call…”
“…[it is RFK, Jr.’s] deal is talk to anyone anytime so not out of character…”
I then tweeted out the refutation to that report last Friday, which was picked up by precisely zero media outlets, thereby demonstrating how extraordinarily easily fake or extremely unreliable news can conveniently make its way into liberal headlines when it benefits them.
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Given the events of last week, I wasn’t entirely surprised to see Nicole Shanahan’s comments today refuting the WaPo claims as well, as I’m sure the campaign was inundated with people sending emails like mine last week after the story dropped.
I had actually jotted down the idea of calling for RFK, Jr. to endorse Trump a week or two ago and was planning on writing an article about it anyway. Given that it’s now being talked about in the mainstream media, I’ll make my points extremely concise.
Many former Democrats and liberals have switched over to the conservative party in the last decade or so as the calibration of the parties has shifted significantly. Left-wing causes have become extraordinarily far-left, while “classic liberal” causes now look more towards the center, or even slightly to the right, because of the Democratic Party’s drastic shift further left.
Prime examples of this include stances on capitalism and war. Looking to former President John F. Kennedy as an example, he was staunchly anti-war and warned of the dangers of moving towards communism. He wanted peace by diplomatic means, and fought for the cause of freedom and liberty, which is something that Democrats used to embrace before the authoritarian shift they’ve undergone the last decade.
Many of the causes that liberals used to support, like freedom of speech, have now become conservative talking points. An idea like Bitcoin would have been rabidly supported by the free thinkers, feminists, and hippies of the 1960s to the 1980s. Now, people like Elizabeth Warren think of it as the devil reincarnate because it doesn’t allow for enough government micromanaging or oversight.
Hell, former Democratic President Bill Clinton even went out of his way to balance the budget, an idea that is unconscionable for Democrats given today’s spending addiction and policy stances on the fiscal state of the country.
When you take a look at his policy choices, as he laid out to me on my podcast with him, RFK, Jr. really is a DINO in today’s age—a Democrat in name only.
Like Joe Biden, the party that he and his family have been threaded into for decades turned on him viciously and all but threw him out the back door and into the dumpster. His own family members have gone out and publicly railed against him in the press. His party wants nothing to do with him and sees him as a thorn in their side — they have infiltrated his campaign, taken him to court and fabricated headlines about him — as Shanahan described in the above interview.
The reasoning for this is simple: we simply don’t have a democratic process unfolding when it comes to selecting our next president.
At least in the Republican Party, people have started to unify around President Trump. If RFK, Jr. had been a Republican to begin with, the dynamic would’ve been interesting to watch, but he wasn’t. He was a Democrat before becoming an independent, and he went out on his own because, like Joe Biden, he had fallen out of favor with a select group of extraordinarily powerful, extraordinarily rich elites that pull the strings for the entire party, arresting any true Democratic ideas or talking points that could get in their way fiercely and without hesitation. We all saw this in 2016 and 2020 with what they did to Bernie Sanders.
In short, the current Democratic Party is everything that former classic liberals used to fight against. They have become the party of reckless spending, the party of encouraging war, the party of censoring speech and media they don’t like, and the party of authoritarian oversight.
On top of this, on the economic side, the Democratic Party has simply become the party of socialism. As I stated in my last article about Kamala Harris, there’s no other way to describe her policy prescriptions other than the top of a very slippery slope that ends in communism. It broke today she is supporting Biden’s plan for 44% capital gains taxes and taxing unrealized gains, something that would undoubtedly destroy the U.S. economy in short order, as I wrote earlier this year.
With the nation running the multi-trillion-dollar deficit it’s running now, with our national debt skyrocketing and interest on the national debt over $1 trillion a year, while nations like China, Russia, and India are openly mounting a challenge to the U.S. dollar, it is unfathomable to me that a presidential candidate wants to make raising taxes further and price controls part of their fiscal policy.
Before we went off the gold standard, America became an economic powerhouse after World War II the old-fashioned way, with sound money. We had a bunch of people return to work, we became an extraordinarily productive nation, we balanced our checkbook, and we were modest with our spending, and, as a result, we saw the nation boom and even survived the inflationary crisis of the 1970s by hiking rates to a level that, today, would destroy the entire global economy.
How many policies that the Democrats support today would President John F. Kennedy have never thrown his support behind?
RFK, Jr. now has an extraordinary opportunity to recalibrate the legacy of his family’s name as standing for what they are best known for.
By withdrawing from the race and putting his support behind President Trump, he could easily help sway crucial votes that could help the nation return power to the people and away from the political elites who wield it now.
RFK, Jr. entered the race because he wanted to effect major change for the future of the United States for the better. Ironically, despite the fact that he won’t come anywhere near the vote total necessary to win, and despite the fact that he’s being left off of New York’s ballots, he still has that very same opportunity on the table, if he wants it, by endorsing Donald Trump and serving in his administration.
Now read:
- 1,307 Days: Kamala Harris Promises To Fix…Her Own Destructive Policies
- Tip Tax Toe: Kamala Harris’ Own IRS Pushed More Tip Tax Reporting Last Year
- Matt Taibbi: Kamala, Trump & The Death Of Objective Truth
- Modern Chickenshit Monetary Theory
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Tyler Durden
Wed, 08/21/2024 – 06:30