Month: June 2022

As we approach the end of the first half, it’s safe to say that how the second progresses will likely be determined by whether the US moves into recession or not (and how soon). In regards to this key question, Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid writes that those readers looking for lead indicators, the bank’s economists have long believed that continuing claims are the best signal for an imminent slide into recession. In a recent piece, they show how an +11.5% rise above the minimum level over the previous year provides the most accurate and timely signal of recession risks since the data becomes available in the 1960s. It works for each recession and normally leads by around 2 months.

In this cycle, the current low was 1306k hit on May 20th 2022. So far it’s up less than 1% to 1315k and would need to hit 1456k for the 2-month recessionary countdown clock to start ticking.

However, as one can can see from the chart below, this isn’t a big pick-up in historical terms so although we’re not trending there at the moment, it wouldn’t take too much to change the picture.

Indeed one concern is that initial jobless claims are up from a trough of 166k in March to 229k last week. Over time, Reid writes, these two series are very well correlated so this is a big enough move to confirm an imminent recession if continuing claims catch up. However this series is seasonally adjusted and non-seasonally adjusted claims are still bumping along the bottom and DB economist Matt Luzzetti thinks there may be some issues with seasonally adjusting so he wouldn’t yet read anything too significant into the pick-up in SA claims.

In any case, Thursday 8:30am EST when the weekly claims data is released, is “showtime” each week for the foreseeable future according to Reid.

Separately, DB’s asset allocation team put out an excellent piece last week (available to professional subscribers) looking at what all the short, medium and long-range US recession indicators are currently telling us. In brief, most that turn down early (6-14 months before a recession) are flashing red, most that warn 1-5 months out are mixed, whereas those that turn late are still mostly showing no signs of recession, however these can often turn only in real time.

More in the full note available to pro subs.

Bank of American has accused struggling retailer Bed Bath & Beyond of cutting off air conditioning in stores in order to quickly lower expenses amid a slump in sales.

The company hit back, however, telling CNN that any changes in store temperature didn’t come from corporate.

“We’ve been contacted about this report, and to be clear, no Bed Bath & Beyond stores were directed to adjust their air conditioning and there have been no corporate policy changes in regard to utilities usage,” a spokesperson said.

After conducting in-person store visits, however, BofA analysts reported “mounting concerns” over significant cuts in employee hours, scaled back utilities, reduced operating hours, and remodeling projects which have been canceled.

What’s more, the company’s rewards program has been scaled back and replaced.

All of this has led the Bank of America analysts to predict that Bed Bath & Beyon will soon announce more closures, as well as a halt to its Buy Buy Baby stores.

Meanwhile, analysts at Riley Securities noted that sales promotions have also fallen flat, along with a decrease in store traffic – causing them to reduce their price target from $17 to $7.

Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times,

The Supreme Court granted an emergency Republican application to reinstate a disputed election map in Louisiana late in the day on June 28, a move that allows the map to remain in place for the next elections.

In the process, the high court also stayed two lower court rulings that found that the redrawn congressional district boundaries in the map probably violated the federal Voting Rights Act by diluting the power of black voters.

The court said in the brief unsigned order (pdf) that it would hold off on considering the merits of the case until after it hears and decides a similar dispute from Alabama that is expected to be argued in the court’s new term that begins in October.

The map was approved by Louisiana state lawmakers in March after they overrode Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards’s veto.

According to a CNN summary, the map kept Republicans’ advantage in five of the Pelican State’s six congressional districts.

This left only the 2nd district, which runs all the way from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, as the state’s only majority black district and the sole district to favor Democrats. Reportedly, 33 percent of all Louisianans are black.

The ruling came in Ardoin v. Robinson, court file 21A814. Kyle Ardoin is Louisiana’s Republican secretary of state.

The emergency application to revive the electoral map was filed with Justice Samuel Alito, who referred the case to the full court.

The court’s liberal members – Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan – dissented from the new decision but did not provide reasons explaining why.

Read more here…

South African state power utility Eskom has been hit with labor unrest contributing to widespread blackouts after ten generation units went offline.

Reuters says Eskom is facing “Stage 6” power cuts that mean most South Africans will experience six hours without power, beginning Tuesday night, one of the worst power crises since 2019. 

“Three of the 10 generation units that had tripped during the night have been returned to service. This, however, is still insufficient to stave off the implementation of Stage 6 load-shedding,” Eskom said in a statement. 

Blackouts were caused primarily by “unlawful and unprotected labor action, which has caused widespread disruption to Eskom’s power plants,” the utility said. 

Since last week, Eskom has enforced “Stage 4” power cuts, shedding 4,000 megawatts (MW) from the national grid. Stage 6 outages mean 6,000 MW will be removed. 

“The group’s coal-fired power plants are prone to faults, and labor protests are constraining its ability to return units to service,” Reuters said, adding, “the protests started last week after wage talks between Eskom and trade unions, including the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa and the National Union of Mineworkers, reached deadlock.” 

Eskom Chief Executive Andre de Ruyter said the strikes are unlawful because electricity is considered an essential service. A court blocked the strike, though protests still happened anyway, crippling the economy. 

Bloomberg points out that energy-intensive companies, such as Anglo American Plc and Glencore Plc, which account for 40% of the nation’s electricity consumption, face severe outages and pose a safety risk to workers operating in deep-level mines. 

Widespread blackouts come as growing concern about South Africa’s faltering economy of lackluster growth, soaring inflation, and high unemployment could unleash a dangerous economic environment known as “stagflation.”  

People are getting angry. 

Load shedding stage 6 ( ESKOM )
Apparently fuel prices are increasing next month
Crime
Corruption
Unemployment
Things are extremely expensive now

South Africa is in mud. We dealing with a lot!! This government is useless!!

— 🦋Kgaliiey🦋 (@Kgaliiey_) June 28, 2022

Auw! Loadshedding stage 6. #loadshedding #SouthAfrica #stage6 pic.twitter.com/VQfuJHxxBS

— Bregje van Weezel (@BregjeWeezel) June 28, 2022

By Lydia Saad of Gallup

Two-thirds of Americans say recent increases in the price of gas are causing them hardship, which is up from 52% feeling this financial pinch in April. Although more Americans say they are experiencing “moderate” rather than “severe” hardship, the percentage describing the hardship as severe has risen from 14% to 22%.

The latest results are based on a June 1-20 Gallup survey. The 67% experiencing hardship is among the highest levels Gallup has found when asking this question at other times of rising gas prices since 2000. The last time it was at this level was in May 2011.

Americans’ reaction to gas prices reflects the relatively sharp increase in pump prices this year, rising by nearly a dollar a gallon in recent months and now averaging close to $5.00 per gallon nationally. Americans were paying just over $2.00 a gallon, on average, at the start of 2021.

Experiencing hardship due to gas prices is, naturally, strongly related to household income.

• Eight in 10 adults in lower-income households — those earning less than $40,000 per year — say the rise in gas prices has caused them financial hardship, with 40% saying it has been severe.

• Nearly as many households making between $40,000 and $99,999 — 73% — report a hardship, although just 20% say it has been severe.

• Half of households earning $100,000 or more report a hardship due to gas prices, with 12% calling it severe.

Majorities Say Summer Driving and Vacations Being Affected

More than six in 10 Americans say the price of gas has caused them to drive less this summer than they might have otherwise. This exceeds the percentages reporting they were curtailing their driving at other times of high gas prices, including in 2000, 2001, 2004, 2005 and 2018. Gallup did not ask this question during the period of high gas prices in 2008.

Fifty-five percent of Americans also say the price of gas is causing them to alter their summer vacation plans. The one time Gallup asked this previously, in May 2005, 46% reported altering their plans. At the same time, slightly fewer than now, 59%, said rising gas prices were causing financial hardship.

Gallup Economic Confidence Index Now Lowest Since 2009

As gas prices have become more burdensome for Americans, their view of the U.S. economy has continued to dim, as indicated by Gallup’s Economic Confidence Index (ECI). The index, which is a summary of Americans’ ratings of current economic conditions and outlook for the economy, has sunk 13 points over the past month to -58. The index has a theoretical range from +100 if all respondents describe the economy in positive terms and think it’s improving to -100 if all describe it in negative terms and think it’s worsening.

Today’s -58 ECI score represents a substantially negative skew in public opinion about the economy and is the lowest measured since a -64 reading in February 2009. At the time, the country was still embroiled in the 2007-2009 recession and confidence was starting to recover after hitting the all-time low of -72 in October 2008.

The latest drop in Gallup’s ECI score reflects harsher assessments of the economy on both aspects of the index:

• The percentage of Americans calling current conditions “poor” has risen eight percentage points in June to 54% — the first time a majority has called conditions poor since 2009. Just 11% say conditions are “good” and 34% “only fair.” Less than 1% describe them as “excellent.”

• A striking 85% in June say the economy is getting worse, up from 77% in May and only two points shy of the record high on this, from June 2008.

Perceptions of Nation’s Most Important Problem Are Steady

Currently, 40% of U.S. adults mention some aspect of the economy when asked to name the country’s chief problem, including 18% mentioning the high cost of living or inflation and 5% citing gas prices explicitly. Another 13% say the economy in general is the top problem, and 1% say it’s the “recession” among a handful of other aspects of the economy mentioned by no more than 1% for each.

A unique aspect of Americans’ current attitudes about the nation is that their top-of-mind mentions of the economy are not nearly as high as would be expected from their explicit ratings that compose the ECI.

While up sharply from 23% a year ago and 19% in June 2020, current net economic mentions are far below the 70% and higher level seen in 2008 and 2009, when economic confidence was similar to or just slightly worse than today. Fewer name economic problems today than did so between 2010 and 2014, when economic confidence was significantly better than it is now.

The top-named noneconomic problem is the government, cited by 18% of Americans, which ties with inflation as the top-named specific problem overall. The government has consistently ranked among the top two mentions since 2016.

Eight percent this month, up from 1% in May, mention guns or gun control as the most important problem facing the country, reflecting Americans’ focus on the issue in the aftermath of mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas. This is the highest percentage mentioning guns since August 2019, after back-to-back mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio.

Another 2% this month mention school shootings, bringing overall concern about gun violence to 10%. That is close to the record-high 13% recorded in March 2018, following the Parkland, Florida, high school shooting.

Other noneconomic issues mentioned by at least 3% of Americans include crime (6%), immigration (5%), lack of unity in the country (5%), ethical/moral decline (4%), race relations (3%) and poverty/homelessness (3%).

Hollywood is dying, their various partners are dying, and they brought it on themselves.  The entertainment and corporate news industry has long had a cringe inducing leftist bias, but for many years their propaganda and their motivations remained comparatively subtle.  Then, something happened.  Maybe it was the election of Donald Trump, maybe it was a unified decision within corporate culture to take the mask completely off and reveal the true ugliness underneath, or, maybe it was just pure arrogance.  Whatever the cause, Hollywood and all the related appendages of the tinsel town religion suddenly turned openly militant and the zealotry was palpable.  

This is a dynamic that had been developing for some time, but truly became an international phenomena around 2016 onward.  It’s important to note that also around this same time there was a burgeoning revelation among conservatives and many moderates that our popular culture had been overrun by people with an agenda, and they did not have our best intentions at heart.  We had been lax in our vigilance.  Many thought that pop culture was “stuff for children” and that the real fight was in politics.  They were wrong.   

The first group that really took notice and spoke up was video game consumers.  This led to open opposition to leftists hijacking the industry and spreading like a cancer into video games journalism.  And, of course, as soon as people expressed distrust the leftists attacked them as “racists, homophobes, bigots, sexists and misogynists.”  A typical gaslighting response that is all too familiar today.  Known as “Gamergate,” leftists to this day still rabidly froth at the mouth over the mere mention of “integrity in video games journalism.”  Leftists really hate it when you expose them.   

There have been many other moments of exposure since 2016, from the negative reactions to Comicsgate, feminist Ghostbusters, feminist Star Wars, woke Star Trek, woke Dr. Who, woke Batwoman, woke He-Man, woke Lord of the Rings, critical race theory in television, trans, LGBT and CRT propaganda in children’s programming, etc.  It’s becoming endless.  Around 95% of all popular entertainment contains multiple layers of leftist messaging.  The market is utterly saturated with it.

This kind of overwhelming propaganda is familiar.  It is a methodology used in communist regimes and authoritarian governments throughout the 20th century including the Soviet Union and Mao’s China, and it almost slipped right under the noses of the majority of Americans and western nations.  The goal is simple:  Make EVERYTHING political.  

Want to escape the real world for a couple of hours into a fantasy land?  Want to see daring tales of classical heroes and villains?  Want to experience history as it actually happened, or at least very close to the historical record?  Are you looking for an archetypal experience, a mythological exploration of the human mind or the human heart – something that almost anyone could relate to?  Sorry, you’re not allowed to escape.  You’re not allowed to examine universal ideas and ideals.  Every single story must be told within the narcissistic framework (or prison) of modern political ideology.  Even in stories set a long time ago in a galaxy far far away.

The extreme political left wants you to think about their beliefs and viewpoints all day everyday.  They want you to assume that their ideology is the ONLY ideology.  They want you to assume that the “majority” of the population thinks as they think.  It’s called manufacturing consensus.

The problem is, the public is aware of the agenda and they are looking for the subliminal and not-so-subliminal messages.  They see the narratives and they are getting sick and tired of it.  Thus, the mantra of “Get Woke, Go Broke” was born.  

The more the leftists in media double down on inserting their politics into every single product, the more broke they get.  Case in point, the continuing decline of the largest media entities in the world.  

The streaming giant Netflix is now imploding, with a multitude of failed woke projects, the company is dealing with a recent subscriber loss of 200,000 and a projected subscriber loss of over 2 million by next month.  The company actually began to falter last year, despite covid lockdowns in many states that should have encouraged people to buy into streaming services as a means to deal with boredom.  Beyond that, the Netflix stock price collapsed from almost $700 a share to $190 a share in less than six months.   

The company will never openly admit it, but woke programming is mostly to blame.  Netflix released an internal memo to employees last month indicating that they would be producing more content for consumers of differing political views and even suggested that any employee that has a problem with that should quit.  A major problem within woke companies is the attitude of low level, low value and low intelligence employees thinking that they should be in charge.  Now it appears that Netflix is trying to clean house, with hundred of people fired in the past couple of weeks.  But, it’s too little too late.       

Disney is another huge example that Get Woke, Go Broke is becoming a social rule.  The company is rife with leftist cultism to the point that it avidly defended the sexualization of children in public schools.  Disney’s attacks on Florida and its stated goal of disrupting the legally ratified and widely supported Anti-Grooming Bill has revealed the disgusting underbelly of the conglomerate for all to see.  Disney wants your kids to be exposed to sexual discussions and mentally ill teachers looking for psychological validation.  

When you target people’s kids, even the normies start to take notice.  

Disney has now suffered multiple box office flops and streaming network failures, from Ms. Marvel, to Obi-Wan to Lightyear, the media giant is crumbling.  You can only put so many CRT and LGBT messages into your movies before it starts to add up to box office poison.  And, you can’t declare fealty to the leftist agenda as a company and then expect the majority of Americans, who are not extreme leftists, to give you their hard earned money.

Disney’s stock price has collapsed this past year from $200 down to $90.  The company is currently relying on continued traffic through its theme parks to sustain it, but with gas prices inflating to record highs it is unlikely that park revenues and tourist dollars will continue to levitate.  

One movie that did do extremely well this year from every angle including from a budget standpoint was Top Gun: Maverick.  Tom Cruise’s love letter to fans of the original film had a budget of $170 million and has grossed over $1 billion globally so far, crushing every other competing film including Disney’s woke film ‘Lightyear.’  With zero leftist propaganda injected into the Maverick story and a perfect balance of fan appreciation and nostalgia, proponents of the war against the woke cult have been proven correct.  Audiences want nothing to do with progressive politics in their entertainment.  It is a fact.

What leftists seem to have forgotten is they don’t own the consumer.   They can pump out an endless array of woke media, but they can’t force the public to buy their products.  We own them.  They are the consumer’s bitch.  Activism in entertainment might be viable at times, but the market has spoken when it comes to “woke,” and the market says no. 

Authored by Frank Fang via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A total of 102 sheriffs in Georgia have joined Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican who is seeking a second term, in a statement condemning Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams over her support of “soft-on-crime policies.”

The statement, released on June 27, also criticized Abrams for “advancing the Defund the Police movement” with her position as a board member at the Marguerite Casey Foundation, a Seattle-based grant-making group, which the sheriffs called an “anti-police organization.”

“Stacey Abrams has repeatedly shown complete disdain for law enforcement and the risk we take every day putting our lives on the line to serve our communities,” the sheriffs wrote.

“Ms. Abrams actively serves on the governing board of—and has profited from—an anti-police organization which openly advocates for abolishing prisons and stripping local police departments of their funding,” they added.

Georgia’s governor race is a rematch between Kemp and Abrams. In 2018, Kemp edged Abrams by 54,723 votes with over 3.9 million voters casting a vote. This year, Kemp defeated former Sen. David Perdue to win the GOP nomination.

So far it has been a tight race between the two candidates. According to a recent poll from Easter Carolina University’s Center for Survey Research, Kemp led Abrams 50 percent to 45 percent. The poll surveyed 868 registered voters in Georgia from June 6 to June 9.

Abrams became a board member of the foundation in May 2021. Less than a month later, she was one of the board members supporting the foundation’s roll-out of an anti-police initiative.

The foundation’s 2020 financial filing (pdf), available on its website, shows that it has given grants to groups including the Movement for Black Lives and Louisville Community Bail Fund.

The foundation is vocal in its support for the #AbolishthePolice and #DefundthePolice movements, as evidenced by the frequent mention of the two Twitter hashtags on its social media account. One recent example involved a post promoting the foundation’s book event.

“Stacey Abrams also supports proposals that put criminals back on our streets and clears their criminal record, and she opposed legislation to crack down on human trafficking when she served in the state legislature,” the sheriffs added.

Read more here…

Lake Mead’s water levels are plunging so fast that houseboats on the nation’s largest reservoir are getting stuck because there’s not enough water in some parts. 

One houseboat was stranded for three weeks after the water quickly dropped earlier this month. Thankfully, YouTubers — Sin City Outdoors of Las Vegas and HeavyDSparks of Salt Lake City — came out with a military jet boat and documented when they pulled the beached houseboat back into the water. 

Dave Sparks and his team arrived Thursday and secured permission from the National Park Service to conduct the recovery operation of the houseboat. 

Persistent drought conditions have pushed Lake Mead to the lowest point since the artificial reservoir was filled nearly a century ago. Water levels have been falling this year, down to 1,043 feet above sea level — and 148 feet from “dead pool,” which is the point water would no longer pass through Hoover Dam to supply California, Arizona, and Mexico. 

A graph might not do justice to visualizing just how fast the water level has fallen. So here are three pictures of a sunken speedboat in the lake and the corresponding date. Just in May, the boat was partially submerged. Now there’s no water. 

Other YouTubers have headed to Lake Mead as well because they know the apocalyptic scenes of a dried-out lake would generate views. 

Here’s more footage of Lake Mead — maybe the body of water (or whatever is left) should be called Desert Mead. 

“As the lake continues to fall the Lake Mead Marina finds itself in a very serious situation. Can it be moved farther out? Other Marinas have already been closed and some of the harbors look like the apocalypse,” YouTuber The Other Me said. 

Some say it could only be a matter of weeks before boat ramps become inaccessible.  

North America’s largest artificial reservoir appears to be in deep trouble.