Category: zerohedge

By Michael Every of Rabobank

Warning: May contain crisis

I am lucky in that I don’t have a serious food allergy, such as to peanuts. I fully grasp just how dangerous these can be to those that unfortunately do, and why we need clear food labels to show if there is even a trace of nuts. Having said that, I always find it ironic that when I get given the standard packet of peanuts on a plane, it is labelled: “Warning: may contain nuts”. Are there people who might not know that peanuts contain nuts? Apparently so.

On that front, there are headlines right round the financial world because the Fed’s latest Financial Stability Report –which is usually read about as carefully as the labels of food packaging for those with no allergies– contained the following warning:

“Vulnerabilities associated with elevated risk appetite are rising. Valuations across a range of asset classes have continued to rise from levels that were already elevated late last year….With investors ebullient on expectations for a strong rebound, it is important to closely monitor risks to the system and ensure the financial system is resilient….strong microprudential safeguards and macroprudential tools…will be important to address risks to financial stability and enable monetary policy to focus on maximum employment and average inflation goals.”  

If this was the easier-to-understand ‘traffic-light’ food labeling system, it would be bright red, like the fat content on a pepperoni four-cheese pizza. Yet is there really anyone in markets who doesn’t see that this ridiculous bubble contains bubbles?

The vast majority know what’s going on. They also know the Fed itself has brought us here. And yet they believe that if things go wrong, again, the Fed –on long-established form– will bail them out – again. This used to be done “because deflation”; now it may be “because society”. Does it matter? Indeed, US markets went up even after being told they were too high by the Fed. As such, the underlying problems are only getting worse.

It’s honestly an open question if the Fed realize this or not. One would like to think they are cynical enough to know what they were doing, and hypocritical enough to then put out reports pretending where we are today is a surprise. Yet there is also the possibility they really are stuck in a crazy mental model and can’t predict that pouring excess liquidity into the financial system, not the real economy, doesn’t drive up productive business investment and inclusive wages, even after years of evidence to that effect.

“Drug dealer complains clients are addicted to drugs”https://t.co/cENwUiS9rj via @financialtimes

— Dylan Grice (@dylangrice) May 7, 2021

The counter-argument is that the only way the Fed could have injected this much liquidity and not seen it go into houses prices, or stock prices, or agri-commodities, or iron ore, or lumber, or Dogecoin, would have been to accept the market mechanism doesn’t work, and to hypothecate the inflow with the micro and macroprudential measures now flagged too late, or directly via MMT. Our global exponential liquidity system is guaranteed to create the risks ‘suddenly’ flagged by the Fed unless it’s strapped down, bisected, and/or hypothecated. But then we don’t get house-price booms or stock price booms or Dogecoin booms. And then where would we be?

By the way, a developed country with almost no peanut allergies is Israel, because of the ubiquity of the peanut-derived snack Bamba, which is loved by kids. Exposure to small amounts of nuts from an early age apparently prevents the deadly allergies that can arise if one has no contact with them. That’s what we used to think was true about risk too – in the classical Schumpeterian conception of how capitalism works. Now we have no risks – and get endless warning labels.

On which, was the stability report a heads up? The RBNZ have been mandated to ‘do something on housing’; the BOC tapered, moderately; the RBA are being dragged in that direction with a copy of the Domain property supplement clutched in hand; and the BOE yesterday tapered, moderately. How long until the Fed makes at least a move in the same direction, assuming this is not all a coincidence? What an anaphylactic shock that will be for some.

Meanwhile, in the broader world of unstable systems and risks we don’t want to see, the G7’s latest communique pre-amble states:

“We commit to strengthening open societies, shared values, and the rules based international order. We affirm that free and fair trade, and the free and secure flow of capital, knowledge, data, ideas, and talent is essential to our long-term prosperity. We affirm that liberal democracy and free and fair markets remain the best model for inclusive, sustainable social and economic advancement. We commit to tackling threats jointly and committing our resources to achieving shared security.”

China was called out, along with a Fun Club of Russia, Ukraine, North Korea, Iran, Syria, Chad, Somalia, etc. Recall when the G7 was all about GDP?

Meanwhile, China says the G7 is “ blatantly meddling” in its internal affairs, and Xi Jinping says that China is “invincible”, regardless of the challenges, while stressing the virtues of self-reliance, not liberal democracy or free and fair markets. China has also symbolically cancelled a high-level economic dialogue with Australia.  

Within the G7 itself, Germany’s Merkel insists the EU-China investment treaty is still going ahead; wants to complete Nord Stream 2; is using a frigate to undermine the symbolism of a major Western naval exercise in the South China Sea; and is now also pushing back against US plans to waive virus vaccine intellectual property protections. At least she isn’t ramming her ship into a British one, or blockading ports, like the French.

The US is apparently going to look at the Phase One US-China trade deal again; and it has already decided to keep the Trump-era restrictions on Chinese investment in the US.

Yet Henry Kissinger argues re: China in the FT: “We should not use the human rights issue as a deliberate issue to undermine the existing structures, because if we do that we will be in a permanent confrontation.” So either the G-7 are spouting empty rhetoric, and/or Western markets’ new ESG focus doesn’t actually apply to a huge slice of the global economy; or Western-China relations are on the edge of either a Cold War schism or a pre-WW1 downwards spiral. What kind of warning label do we slap on that?

In early 2020, shortly after we correctly predicted that institutional buying of bitcoin would send the cryptocurrency soaring (and just before Elon Musk announced that Tesla had purchased $1.5 billion in bitcoin), we said that the next big catalyst for Bitcoin would be when Bridgewater, the world’s largest hedge fund, announces it had started purchasing bitcoin.

Next catalyst higher: Bridgewater starts buying bitcoin. https://t.co/adixQWnpMv

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) February 8, 2021

The reason for this was a dramatic reversal by the formerly Bridgewater founder (and one-time bitcoin skeptic) Ray Dalio who in late January said that “I and my colleagues at Bridgewater are intently focusing on alternative storehold of wealth assets and expect Bridgewater to soon offer an alt-cash fund and a storehold of wealth fund in order to better deal with the devaluation of money and credit that we consider to be a major risk and opportunity, and Bitcoin wont escape our scrutiny.”

Translated, we said, “this means that in the near future Bridgewater itself will be buying bitcoin.”

And as wait for the official announcement, moments ago we got the clearest hint of what is coming when Bitcoin services firm NYDIG “a leading provider of investment and technology solutions for Bitcoin” announced it had hired John Dalby, who until today was CFO of Bridgewater (and previously was CFO at D.E. Shaw Renewables and had spent more than two decades at UBS Group AG) as its own Chief Financial Officer.

“Every day, more industries come to understand Bitcoin’s potential and more clients seek ways to safely access it. Personally, I share NYDIG’s vision for Bitcoin’s ability to propel economic empowerment for all. I eagerly look forward to doing my part to help NYDIG deliver innovative Bitcoin solutions to institutions and individuals”, Dalby said in a statement.

According to NYDIG, the appointment of Dalby “comes during a period of rapid growth for NYDIG. The firm recently raised more than $300 million from a group of strategic partners including Stone Ridge Holdings Group, Morgan Stanley, New York Life, MassMutual, Liberty Mutual, Starr Companies, and FIS. The firm also recently announced the launch of a global Insurance Solutions practice led by former Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of TransRe, Mike Sapnar, who will spearhead the creation of bitcoin-powered products and services for the global insurance industry.”

Dalby is hardly the first prominent CFO to embrace alt-currencies. In 2018, Alesia Haas left as CFO of Och-Ziff Capital or whatever it’s called today, to join Coinbase.

Earlier today we reported that Goldman had relaunched its crypto trading desk and now offers Bitcoin derivatives to Wall Street investors.

China’s Long March 5B Rocket is expected to tumble back to Earth this weekend, but at an unknown place, which as we described earlier is driving fears that tons of debris could fall on populated areas below. 

China is now seeking to calm fears as well as international criticism over the rocket’s uncontrolled descent as it is still circling the globe some 15 times a day at a speed of about 18,000mph. “The probability of this process causing harm on the ground is extremely low,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said in a new statement. But it’s 100-feet in length and 22 tons in weight gives it the potential to be the biggest space debris to ever fall to the earth.

The spokesman said further that China is closely monitoring the rocket’s reentry into the atmosphere and that it’s expected that most of it will be burned up in the process. China’s Global Times also this week speculated it’s likely to fall down somewhere in international waters.

US Space Command said that it too is carefully tracking the rocket’s location during the uncontrolled reentry, but stressed that it “cannot be pinpointed until within hours of its reentry,” currently projected to happen likely on Saturday, May 8.

The US military went so far as to clarify that no, it does not have plans to shoot down the rocket at this time – though we can imagine plans would change if it were confirmed to be hurling toward New York City or Washington D.C. “We have the capability to do a lot of things but we don’t have a plan to shoot it down as we speak,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters Thursday.

“We’re hopeful that it will land in a place where it won’t harm anyone. Hopefully in the ocean, or someplace like that,” Austin said. But he also strongly suggested that China was negligent in allowing the rocket body to fall out of orbit and enter an uncontrollable trajectory:

“I think this speaks to the fact that, for those of us who operate in the space domain, there’s a requirement, or should be a requirement to operate in a safe and thoughtful mode,” Austin said

There is a need to “make sure that we take those kinds of things into consideration as we plan and conduct operations” in space, he said.

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said on Thursday there was no plan at this point to shoot down the remnants of a large Chinese rocket expected to plunge back through the atmosphere this weekend. pic.twitter.com/DoULRdEgQu

— ANews (@anews) May 7, 2021

The Long March 5B rocket was launched on April 28 in order to send key components to China’s new next-generation space station, but there are already ten more similar supply missions to the space station planned, suggesting the likelihood of many more such scenarios to come wherein the world waits expectantly for falling rocket to debris to hopefully avoid inhabited areas, or not cause severe damage. 

The Associated Press writes while citing the words of Harvard-based astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, “Based on its current orbit, the debris trail is likely to fall somewhere as far north as New York, Madrid, or Beijing and as far south as southern Chile and Wellington, New Zealand, or anywhere in between.”

Authored by Isabel van Brugen via The Epoch Times,

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said on Thursday that her team at times tells President Joe Biden not to answer questions from reporters.

Psaki made the remarks during an appearance on CNN’s podcast “The Axe Files with David Axelrod.”

CNN Senior Political Commentator Axelrod brought up an incident from earlier this year when the president was put on the spot by CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins about whether a provision to raise the minimum wage to $15 would be part of the pandemic relief bill that was signed into law in March.

The president at the time was unaccompanied by his communications team and answered the question.

Axelrod asked the press secretary how she manages scenarios where Biden takes impromptu questions from reporters.

“He was right, but it must have given you a lot of heartburn and [made you] ask yourself, ‘Why are we allowing him to roll around in the hallways doing impromptu interviews?’” Axelrod asked.

“He takes questions nearly every day he’s out [with] the press,” Psaki said.

“That is not something we recommend. In fact, a lot of times we say ‘don’t take questions,’” Psaki told Axelrod, noting that at the time, she had finished work for the day and the president was on his way back to his residence.

She continued, “But he’s going to do what he wants to do because he’s the president of the United States.”

The president has only held one formal press conference, which took place 65 days into his presidency on March 25, after mounting pressure from critics and journalists. Biden waited longer than any other president in four decades to hold the formal briefing.

By contrast, his 15 predecessors held solo press briefings within the first 33 days of their respective presidencies. Former President Donald Trump took questions after 27 days in office, while former President Barack Obama held a formal press conference 20 days into his first term.

The president gave his first prime-time address on March 11 but took no questions afterwards.

Photographs taken during his first solo press conference showed that he consulted notes that assisted him with key policy points and data, and appeared to show numbered images of reporters attending the event.

The president took questions only from a list of reporters whose outlets and names were listed and numbered on a cue card. Biden took 31 questions from reporters, notably ignoring those from Fox News and The New York Times.

The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

As a team of researchers fears the number of deaths reported in India could double in the coming weeks as the country’s brutal second wave intensifies, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is facing growing pressure to reimpose the type of strict national lockdown that he used to suppress COVID-19 cases last year in what was hailed as a successful campaign to stamp out the virus.

Many medical experts, opposition leaders and even Supreme Court judges are calling for national restrictions, arguing that a patchwork of state rules is insufficient to quell the rise in infections. Modi said last month that a new lockdown would only be imposed as a last resort. But on Friday, India reported a new daily record of 414,188 confirmed cases and 3,915 additional deaths. The official daily death count has stayed over 3K for the past 10 days. Meanwhile, a mathematical model prepared by Modi’s advisors suggests that the outbreak could soon peak in the coming days, the AP reported.

That brings the total to more than 21.4 million COVID-19 infections and over 234,000 deaths. However, experts have long contended that these numbers dramatically undercount the true total. Some have put the total infections at north of 100MM, making India the worst-hit country in the world by far.

To try and illustrate this, the Washington Post reported yesterday that obituaries reveal many uncounted deaths. WaPo checked crematorium statistics in three cities in three Indian states and found a wide divergence from official tallies. In all of the cases, the statistics released by state authorities appeared to capture only a fraction of actual deaths.

Offering one example, the paper found numerous examples of patients who died while sitting in a car, or an ambulance parked outside a hospital waiting for treatment. Thousands have died this way, and their deaths have been almost totally ignored.

Experts told WaPo that the true scope of the devastation in India may never be known. In Bhopal, a large city in central India, crematorium records bear little resemblance to the official count. Mamtesh Sharma has worked for 20 years for the trust that runs the Bhadbhada crematorium in the city, one of several. :I don’t know about the government’s data but I am telling you what I see with my own eyes,” Sharma told WaPo.

He shared a ledger that he maintains of all the cremations that have taken place since April 11, with a separate column for those conducted according to covid-19 protocols. The fewest number of daily cremations of covid-19 victims was 34; the highest was 100, on April 24. Yet the official figures for such deaths in Bhopal never went above 10 for a single day in that period.

“I have never seen so many dead bodies in my life,” Sharma said. “This second wave is killing people ruthlessly.”

As India’s outbreak appears to spill outside its borders, India’s main opposition leader Rahul Gandhi warned on Friday that unless India’s second wave of COVID is brought under control, it would soon spread to infect the rest of the world.

In a letter, Gandhi called on Modi to prepare for another national lockdown, accelerate a country-wide vaccination program and scientifically track the virus and its mutations, Reuters reported.

In “a globalized and interconnected world”, India has a responsibilty to stop the “explosive” spread of the virus within its own borders, Gandhi said.

“India is home to one out of every six human beings on the planet. The pandemic has demonstrated that our size, genetic diversity and complexity make India fertile ground for the virus to rapidly mutate, transforming itself into a more contagious and more dangerous form,” wrote Gandhi.

“Allowing the uncontrollable spread of the virus in our country will be devastating not only for our people but also for the rest of the world.”

Modi has been widely criticised for not acting sooner to suppress the second wave, after religious festivals and political rallies drew tens of thousands of people in recent weeks and became “super spreader” events.

Via Doomberg substack,

“Speculation on the stock exchange has spread to all ranks of the population and shares rise like air balloons to limitless heights…. The population was now engaged in evading taxation and devoting their money to speculative purchases…. Shares in respectable concerns which had paid a 20% dividend, were pushed higher and higher till the final holders could not expect a return of even 1%.”

– Adam Fergusson, When Money Dies

How quaint.

I am an avid consumer of written history. As a doom-oriented pattern recognizer, the written chronology of historically transformative events provides an endless source of almost-relevant analogies to fret over. For those of us in the gold/hard money/real asset/Austrian school of economics, the ultimate doom porn is Adam Fergusson’s seminal book on the hyperinflation experienced in Germany after World War I, When Money Dies. Unlike most of you, I’ve only read it three times.

When I read the retelling of history, I try to imagine what the people were thinking in the moment. Not what they would later claim they were thinking with the benefit of hindsight, but how they digested the daily news headlines in real time, internalized the risks and rewards of the present day, and behaved in ways that I can only assume were in their best interest as they understood it. Did they sense what was coming or did they think things would quickly regress back to normal? How did certain people separate signal from noise and protect themselves, while others drowned in the oncoming tsunami of destruction?

I also greatly respect the wisdom of crowds. When I see a bunch of people doing something I wouldn’t do, I try hard to resist the temptation to assume they know less than I do, and instead try to internalize what I might be missing.

Which brings us to Dogecoin.

What is Dogecoin you ask? I’m no expert in cryptocurrencies, but I know enough to be dangerous. Put simply, Dogecoin is a joke cryptocurrency that serves no purpose. It was created as such nearly a decade ago and left for dead soon thereafter. Here’s how Coinbase describes it:

“Dogecoin emerged in 2013 as a joke. It was created by Jackson Palmer and Billy Markus to satirize the growth of altcoins by making the doge internet meme into a cryptocurrency… There is no cap to the supply of coins and thus the coin can inflate infinitely.”

Here are a few other fun facts about Dogecoin. First, as noted above, the creators programmed in uncapped but fixed inflation, with potential new supply being created at an additional 5.256 billion coins per year. Second, you can’t buy and sell Dogecoin on Coinbase, presumably because it’s a little too dodgy (Doge-y?) for them. There are plenty of other crypto exchanges that will allow you to transact, including Binance and, as of this week, Gemini. The third, and I believe most interesting, fact is that Robinhood began allowing its millions of users to trade Dogecoin in 2020. For the first time, you didn’t need to leave the “traditional” financial system to speculate on this purposely worthless meme coin.

And speculate they have! Thanks to a cadre of high-profile pumpers (aka, future dumpers) led by Elon Musk, Tyler Winklevoss, Mark Cuban, and an ever-oppressive army of online bots, Dogecoin is the latest shiny new financial mania. At the time of this writing, a Dogecoin fetches about $0.66 each, which doesn’t seem like much until you consider there are about 130 billion of these things floating around the metaverse.

There isn’t much about Dogecoin on Bloomberg, but I did find this: The Compass Crypto Reference Index Dogecoin represents the value of the DogeCoin at 4pm London Time according to the Compass Crypto Reference Indices methodology.

Close enough for Doomberg. Let’s look at the chart:

For practically all of 2020, you could have purchased as many Dogecoins as your heart desired for the low, low price of $0.0025 each. If you owned a crystal ball, a mere $10,000 invested would be worth more than $2.5 million this morning, a tidy profit of ~25,000%. And who knows where this is headed? If the market cap of nothing can approach $90B, what’s to stop it from approaching $1T?

While it’s fun to contemplate the fact that a joke coin is now valued like a newly minted member of the Fortune 100, I’m mostly interested in what this all means on a deeper level.

The doomer in me harkens back to the Adam Fergusson quote at the top of this essay. In the early days of Weimar hyperinflation, one of the ways people reacted in the moment was to speculate wildly in the stock market. While it seems laughable to think of a stock being absurdly priced because it “only” yields a dividend of 1% (Dogecoin: “Hold my beer!”), at that time it was unthinkable. Effectively, the crowd was saying “I’ll trade my Deutschmarks for ANYTHING, no matter the price.” In hindsight, the early and widespread speculation in the stock market was more signal than noise. The crowd was speaking.

Is the crowd speaking now? Does Dogecoin teach us about the collective confidence in modern fiat currencies? None other than Tyler Winklevoss himself, as CEO of Gemini, published a commentary on the explosive movements in Dogecoin this morning. Here’s a few key paragraphs:

“Dogecoin is the people’s money. It’s organic, irreverent, and fun. It’s not forced on us by a government or some other central authority, it’s chosen by us, for us — by the people, for the people. Wow.

For many, the idea of emergent money that is not mandated by fiat is hard to grok. We’re used to being told what money is. For most of our lives, paternalistic money is all we’ve ever known…until Bitcoin.

Dogecoin continues Bitcoin’s tradition of giving the control of money back to the people. Yes, it’s a meme coin, but all money is a meme. And all money is both an idea and a matter of faith or belief in it. Over the multi-millennia history of money, the majority of money (be it shells, beads, precious metals, etc.) has been what we the people say it is and believe it is.

Dogecoin is the perfect vehicle to lay bare this fundamental truth about money. And in serving this purpose, DOGE has a legitimate claim to some value. It reflects the true history and nature of money. It turns the idea of money being something that’s issued by an authority — a conceit — on its head. They say there’s some truth in every joke. Dogecoin’s value is its punchline.”

TL;DR…

This is Hilarious. And genius.
*the dog money bubble will not likely last forever.
pic.twitter.com/j6eXOIR6wI

— Mr Reagan 🇺🇸 (@MrReaganUSA) May 2, 2021

What role does Robinhood play in all this? An important one, I think. Robinhood is controversial because it employs heavy gamification and other toxic tricks weaponized by Silicon Valley to capture and keep your attention. Having played with the app myself, I can testify to how simple, fun and addictive it makes the otherwise serious job of investing feel. You aren’t really investing. You’re playing a fun game with a scorecard. A game you want to win, for sure, but most importantly for our narrative, a game you want to keep playing.

In the first Doomberg essay, Reflections from the Lake, I emphasized how the convergence of easy fiscal and monetary policy with supply chain disruptions was potentially made more dangerous by the toxic weaponization of social media by apps like Twitter, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. I argued that viral videos and memes threatened to shorten the path from elevated to hyperinflation in a way our leaders almost certainly don’t understand. The Dogecoin phenomenon offers strong evidence for this hypothesis.

A group of highly influential social media titans accumulated a healthy helping of Dogecoins for themselves, then used their online power to amplify Doge memes and converted Dogecoin into the phenomenon we observe today. Egged on by the seductive powers of Robinhood, hordes of retail traders are piling in, happily risking US dollars for the latest speculative mania.

At a minimum, the signal I am hearing loud and clear is that if and when inflation memes replace Doge memes, and certain bad actors wish to accelerate the downfall of the US dollar, the infrastructure exists to take things to levels unthinkable by most people today…and quickly. Not even the sky is the limit. Not for this Doge.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Thursday all but announced that she plans to step down next year. 

“I think it’s going to be time for somebody else to have this job, in a year from now or about a year from now,” she told longtime Democratic operative David Axelrod on his CNN podcast, “The Axe Files.”

This, despite being hit with nothing but scripted softball questions when she can avoid Fox News’ Peter Doocy, comes on the heels of remarks she made earlier this year to the New York Times, when she discussed giving someone else a shot at the job, according to The Hill.

“I think there frankly needs to be diverse spaces and voices as communicators,” she told the Times. “Women, certainly, but beyond that,” whatever that means.

 

 

Elon Musk said in January of this year that he was “highly confident [a Tesla] will be able to drive itself with reliability in excess of human this year.”

To many of us, we knew it was nonsense. Musk has been crowing about Full Self Driving in Tesla vehicles – a feature that neither exists, per what its name claims, nor has been proven to be reliably safe – for years. On top of that, Tesla has sold billions of dollars in vehicles and taken deposits for years based on the idea that Full Self Driving technology would come to fruition at some point in the future.

Now, an admission from Tesla seems to confess what anyone paying attention already knew: there will be no Full Self Driving by the end of 2021. And if we were betting people, we’d bet we’re not going to see it anytime shortly after that, either. 

The company “told a California regulator that it may not achieve full self-driving technology by the end of this year,” according to Reuters on Friday. The memo was originally unearthed by legal website PlainSite. 

“Tesla indicated that Elon is extrapolating on the rates of improvement when speaking about L5 capabilities. Tesla couldn’t say if the rate of improvement would make it to L5 by end of calendar year,” the memo said. 

It continued: “Tesla indicated that they are still firmly in L2. As Tesla is aware, the public’s misunderstanding about the limits of the technology and its misuse can have tragic consequences.”

The California DMV said in a memo about its March 9 conference call with Tesla representatives: “Elon’s tweet does not match engineering reality per CJ. Tesla is at Level 2 currently.” Level 2 means a semi-automated driving system, but one that requires human supervision. 

Despite this, it hasn’t stopped Tesla from rolling out (and then hurriedly recalling) “beta” versions of its FSD, which it has been doing since October of last year. The company’s Autopilot and FSD “features” have been under increased scrutiny since a fatal April accident involving a Tesla near Houston. 

It goes without saying: today’s massive jobs report miss – the biggest since 1998 and the second biggest in history – was not pretty: with just 266K jobs added, this was a nearly 4-sigma miss to expectations of a 1 million print.

The reality is that the number could have been even worse: had it not been for some 187,000 workers added in food service and drinking places (i.e. waiters and bartenders) as well as 72,700 gambling, amusements and recreation workers (i.e., card dealers), the April print would have been virtually unchanged from last month.

And a remarkable observation: part-time jobs plunged by the most since last March, because why work a dead-end part-time gig when the government will pay you double to do nothing.

With that in mind, here is a breakdown of the jobs added in April:

• Leisure and hospitality jobs increased by 331,000, as pandemic-related restrictions continued to ease in many parts of the country. As noted above, more than half of the increase was in food services and drinking places (+187,000). Job gains also occurred in amusements, gambling, and recreation (+73,000) and in accommodation (+54,000). Incidentally, although leisure and hospitality has added 5.4 million jobs over the year, employment in the industry is down  by 2.8 million, or 16.8 percent, since February 2020.
• “Other Services” jobs increased by 44,000 with gains in repair and maintenance (+14,000) and personal and laundry services (+14,000).
• Local government education increased by 31,000 in April. Federal government employment increased by 9,000 over the month.
• Social assistance employment rose by 23,000, with about half of the increase in child day care services (+12,000).
• Financial activities jobs rose by 19,000 over the month, with most of the gain occurring in real estate and rental and leasing (+17,000).
• Within professional and business services, employment in temporary help services declined by 111,000 in April and is 296,000 lower than in February 2020. Business support services lost jobs in April (-15,000), while architectural and engineering services and scientific research and development services added jobs (+12,000 and +7,000, respectively).
• In Transportation and warehousing, employment in couriers and messengers fell by 77,000 in April but is up by 126,000 since February 2020. Air transportation added 7,000 jobs over the month.
• Manufacturing employment edged down in April (-18,000), following gains in the previous 2 months (+54,000 in March and +35,000 in February). In April, job losses in motor vehicles and parts (-27,000) and in wood products (-7,000) more than offset job gains in miscellaneous durable goods manufacturing (+13,000) and chemicals (+4,000).
• Retail trade employment changed little in April (-15,000), following a gain in the prior month (+33,000). In April, employment declined in food and beverage stores (-49,000), general merchandise stores (-10,000), and gasoline stations (-9,000). These losses were partially offset by employment increases in sporting goods, hobby, book, and music stores (+20,000); clothing and clothing accessories stores (+10,000); and health and personal care stores (+9,000).
• Health care jobs dropped by 4,000 in April as a job gain in ambulatory health care services (+21,000) was largely offset by a job loss in nursing care facilities (-19,000).
• Construction employment was unchanged over the month. Employment in the industry is up by 917,000 over the year but is 196,000 below its February 2020 level.

And Visually:

The Biden DOJ has indicted former police officer Derek Chauvin and three other former Minneapolis police officers on federal civil rights charges for their roles in the death of George Floyd.

The indictment alleges that Chauvin, along with J. Alexander Kueng, Tou Thao and Thomas Lane violated Floyd’s rights when they saw him lying on the ground “in clear need” of medical attention, but instead “willfully failed to aid Floyd, thereby acting with deliberate indifference to a substantial risk of harm.”

Chauvin was charged with one count of deprivation of rights under color of law for his direct role in the 46-year-old Floyd’s May 25, 2020 death, according to ABC News.

“Chauvin held his left knee across George Floyd’s neck, and his right knee on Floyd’s back and arm, as George Floyd lay on the ground, handcuffed and unresisting, and kept his knees on Floyd’s neck and body even after Floyd became unresponsive,” reads the indictment. “This offense resulted in bodily injury to, and the death of George Floyd.”

In addition to allegedly violating Floyd’s rights, Chauvin is named a second, separate indictment filed on Thursday for deprivation of rights under color of law for allegedly violating the civil rights of a 14-year-old in 2017. The indictment said “Chauvin, without legal justification, held” the teen “by the throat and struck Juvenile 1 multiple times in the head with a flashlight.” Chauvin is also accused of holding “his knee on the neck and the upper back of Juvenile 1 even after Juvenile 1 was lying prone, handcuffed, and unresisting.”

Thao and Kueng are separately charged in count two of the indictment for depriving Floyd’s rights, with the grand jury accusing them of being “aware that [Chauvin] was holding his knee across George Floyd’s neck as Floyd lay handcuffed and unresisting, and that Defendant Chauvin continued to hold Floyd to the ground even after Floyd became unresponsive, and the defendants willfully failed to intervene to stop Defendant Chauvin’s use of unreasonable force.” –ABC News

Chauvin was convicted on all charges last month in the murder of Floyd; second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. The other three officers are awaiting trial.