Month: February 2024

By Sam Bourgi of CreditNews

Faced with chronically low supply and record housing costs, 2023 was America’s worst year for home sales in nearly three decades.

But despite dire headlines to the contrary, there still exist red-hot housing pockets where listings are going off the market within weeks—especially in smaller cities.

As we approach the busier spring homebuying season, Creditnews Research ranked the fastest-selling housing markets in America within the top 100 most populous metropolitan areas.

The study also compared how these rankings have evolved since the beginning of Covid and discovered a major shift in best-selling markets.

In fact, none of the 10 fastest-selling metros before Covid made it to the best-selling list today, and vice versa. For example, today’s top-selling metro Hartford ranked just 48th before Covid.

Part of the reason behind this realignment is different inventory levels across the nation—which, we found, has a strong connection with how fast listings sell.

Key Findings

• The top 10 fastest-selling metro areas of 2024 are all located on the East Coast and Midwest, with Hartford, CT, Rochester, NY, Syracuse, NY, Harrisburg, PA, and Richmond, PA coming out on top;

• Five of the top 10 fastest-selling metros were also among the top 10 areas that lost the most per-capita housing inventory since the beginning of Covid;

• The top 10 slowest-selling metro areas are Austin, TX, McAllen, TX, Poughkeepsie, NY, San Antonio, TX, New Orleans, LA, Jacksonville, FL, Cape Coral, FL, Colorado Springs, CO, Deltona, FL, and New York, NY;

• Seven of the top 10 slowest-selling metro areas are located in southern states, and three of them are located in Texas: Austin, McAllen, and San Antonio;

• Austin, TX, is also the biggest Covid “loser,” with its median listing requiring 66 days to sell, compared to 23 before Covid;

• The biggest Covid “winner” is Hartford, CT, with its median days-to-pending marking a major drop from 52 days to eight days between January 2020 and January 2024;

• There’s a strong correlation between housing inventory and selling pace between January 2020 and January 2024.

There are reports of a mass casualty event in Gaza City on Thursday, with Hamas claiming at least 104 Palestinians killed and several hundred wounded or injured (though casualty numbers have fluctuated in the immediate aftermath). However, Israel is disputing local accounts of what happened and says people died following a stamped caused by Palestinians rushing aid trucks.

There are several different versions of what happened, but all accounts agree that mayhem was unleashed when some 30 humanitarian aid trucks containing food were positioned on the street under Israeli protection. Gaza has been on the brink of famine, and so reportedly hundreds of people rushed toward to trucks hoping to obtain something.

And that’s when according to The Guardian, “An Israeli source said Israeli troops opened fire on Thursday at ‘several people’ among a crowd that surrounded aid trucks in the Gaza Strip after feeling under threat.”

Quickly in the aftermath, and as gruesome videos emerged from the scene, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas issued a statement condemning what he described as “the ugly massacre conducted by the Israeli occupation army this morning.”

Palestinians say that Israeli troops shot indiscriminately into the crowd and used the aid trucks in a kind of “ambush” – while Israel’s military says people were killed in a “stampede for aid” and “crowd crush”, and that some of the deaths were the result of Israeli soldiers being under immediate threat. 

Widely circulating video from the aftermath (warning: disturbing images)

⚡️Harsh scenes after the occupation committed a massacre against Palestinians on Al-Rashid Street in Gaza while they were waiting for aid.

More than 150 martyrs so far. pic.twitter.com/4tTH305r3j

— War Monitor (@WarMonitors) February 29, 2024

Al Jazeera’s on the ground account is as follows: 

The more we talk to people about what happened during the attack near Gaza City this morning, the more it becomes clear they feel it was a trap, an ambush.

As soon as people approached incoming trucks carrying food aid, they were shot at. There were attack drones in the sky. There was also fire from naval forces and armored vehicles in the vicinity.

All at once, these military forces fired at a group of people who were hungry, traumatized and displaced. People who were just trying to get their hands on whatever they could to feed their families and stay alive.

The number of dead from the attack has now risen to 104 and there are still, unfortunately, injured people left on the road. Paramedics, civil defense crew and volunteers are trying to help get these people to hospitals, but are finding it very difficult to get to the area. We are expecting the number of casualties to increase even more in the coming hours.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are admitting that at least some of the deaths are the result of Israeli fire. “However, the army also acknowledged that troops opened fire on several of the Gazans, who they said were endangering soldiers,” reports Times of Israel.

This morning humanitarian aid trucks entered northern Gaza, residents surrounded the trucks and looted the supplies being delivered. As a result of the pushing, trampling and being run over by the trucks, dozens of Gazans were killed and injured.

— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) February 29, 2024

The IDF is saying that the vast majority of the deaths were the result of the stampede itself, or being run over by trucks, after “looting” broke out. There were reportedly some 30 trucks and thousands of Palestinians rushing past checkpoints during the mayhem to try and access the aid. 

Israel has since published overhead drone footage which its says vindicates its version of events, but which also included the admission of shooting people in the legs. The below contains the IDF version of events:

According to an initial IDF probe of the crush, the vast majority of the casualties were a result of trampling and being struck by the aid trucks.

The incident began at around 4 a.m., when some 30 trucks carrying humanitarian aid arrived at the coast of Gaza City, to deliver food to Palestinians in the Rimal neighborhood.

…Dozens of Palestinians who rushed the last truck in the convoy began to move toward an IDF tank and troops stationed at the military’s checkpoint, the investigation found.

An officer stationed in the area ordered soldiers to fire warning shots in the air as the Palestinians were within a few dozen meters, as well as gunfire at the legs of those who continued to move toward the troops, the probe said.

The IDF said that fewer than 10 of the casualties were a result of Israeli fire.

Below is the drone footage published by Israel’s military:

תיעוד אווירי של המבצע להכנסת סיוע הומניטארי לצפון רצועת עזה, המראה כיצד ההמון פלסטיני התנפל על המשאיות וכתוצאה מכך נהרגו עשרות מצפיפות, דוחק ודריסה>> pic.twitter.com/a7DqU9kKFB

— צבא ההגנה לישראל (@idfonline) February 29, 2024

The Associated Press has interviewed one of the victims and has published the following eyewitness account:

Kamel Abu Nahel, who was being treated for a gunshot wound at Shifa hospital, said he and others went to the distribution point in the middle of the night because they heard there would be a delivery of food. “We’ve been eating animal feed for two months,” he said.

He said Israeli troops opened fire on the crowd, causing it to scatter, with some people hiding under nearby cars. After the shooting stopped, they went back to the trucks, and the soldiers opened fire again. He was shot in the leg and fell over, and then a truck ran over his leg as it sped off, he said.

Medics arriving at the scene on Thursday found “dozens or hundreds” lying on the ground, according to Fares Afana, the head of the ambulance service at Kamal Adwan hospital. He said there were not enough ambulances to collect all the dead and wounded and that some were being brought to hospitals in donkey carts.

Hamas has released a statement saying this mass killing calls into question the future of ceasefire talks. “The negotiations conducted by the movement’s leadership are not an open process at the expense of the blood of our people,” the statement said as reported by Reuters.

Just days ago President Biden raised eyebrows in hastily and seemingly prematurely declaring his hope that a truce deal between Hamas and Israel would be achieved by Monday. But now this is even less likely, though that timetable was acknowledged as unrealistic by all parties in response. A spokesperson for Biden’s National Security Council said this in the wake of Thursday’s Gaza City tragedy: “This is a serious incident and we are looking into the reports. We mourn the loss of innocent life and recognize the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza, where innocent Palestinians are just trying to feed their families.”

Amid the increased desperation and some initial reports that children in Gaza have already begun dying of starvation and malnutrition, the US administration is now said to be mulling air-dropping food crates and medical supplies over Gaza. Jordan has already been doing this with some degree of success, as we previously highlighted.

Via SchiffGold.com,

This week Peter covers the highlights of the last few weeks of volatile trading, paying special attention to Nvidia, Wall Street’s favorite AI stock, and Newmont Corporation, a heavy hitter in the gold mining industry.

Both companies’ shares experienced dramatic price action, with NVDA gaining $260 billion in market cap and pulling the market up after an excellent earnings report. Newmont, on the other hand, saw shares fall 7% after a disappointing last quarter. 

Peter explains how monetary policy influences the profitability of mining:

“Part of the big problem for Newmont and all the other mining stocks is that it’s so much more expensive to mine gold now … Now why is that? Inflation. Inflation is taking a huge toll on the profits of these companies because the price of gold has not risen as much as the cost of mining it. And that is again why I keep saying gold mining stocks are the ironic victims of inflation.”

Nvidia and the tech sector’s recent surge is reminiscent of the market in the late 1990s, right before the Dot-com bubble popped:

“What’s really significant about today’s situation is that you’ve got 1999-2000 all over again in the stock market, but it’s more like 2008 in terms of the disaster that’s waiting around the corner. We didn’t have a financial crisis in 2001. That didn’t happen until 2008.”

[ZH: Or 1930s…]

This doesn’t mean A.I. technology is doomed to fail. Rather, innovative companies like Nvidia are currently swept up in an overheating economy that will eventually give way to inflationary pressures:

“There’s no doubt that artificial intelligence will be helpful… The markets once again are way ahead of the reality of where all of this is going, and at the same time, they’re overlooking the tremendous economic problems and financial problems that are hiding in plain sight.“

[ZH: It’s different this time…]

Peter also discusses the FOMC minutes that were released this week, which showed Fed officials are still hesitant about cutting interest rates. Gold responded well to this news, as it did last week after higher-than-expected CPI figures were released:

“The gold market kinda shrugged it off, which really shows you the underlying strength in the market. There was a brief sell-off in stocks, but I think investors quickly realized that look, … we’re going to get these cuts… What the markets are focused on is that the hikes are over… We’ve got the wind at our back. The question is… how strong is that wind?”

Recent moves in the price of oil, mortgage rates, and treasury yields suggest these investors are overly optimistic:

“These market indicators are showing that inflation is coming back, that we’ve bottomed out, and we’re just moving higher. And the markets do not expect that this is possible… If they’re wrong, the stock market is going to collapse.”

Markets are expecting rates to fall this spring, but they need to rise:

“If the Fed doesn’t hike rates, it could be even worse— maybe not for the market, but for the dollar, for bonds, and even more bullish for gold… If the Fed doesn’t hike rates, then inflation is just going to run out of control. And in fact, even if the Fed doesn’t cut rates— if it leaves rates where they are— real rates are going down because inflation is going to go up!”

Advocates of rate hikes are wrong when they assert that recent rate hikes constitute “restrictive monetary policy:”

“This is not restrictive monetary policy. Again, less loose doesn’t qualify as tight… What is being restricted? Is the government being restricted? Is there any cutback in government spending? Is the government borrowing less because the Fed has increased the cost of borrowing money? No! The government is borrowing more! In fact, they’re borrowing more to pay the higher interest rates.”

Peter wraps up by discussing a hefty fine leveled against Donald Trump in a New York fraud case. In this case and others, a politicized legal system portends a riskier and increasingly unattractive business environment, both in New York and in the rest of the country:

“One of the reasons that a lot of international money has invested in America over the years is the confidence in our legal system, in the rule of law, in private property— that you can own property, assets, and business here, and you’re protected by the rule of law. It just can’t be arbitrarily taken from you, but what we’re now showing the world is that’s not the case!“

While Wall Street celebrates a record week, Peter’s insights are less optimistic. It is unlikely a handful of tech stocks can perpetually sustain an economy burdened by years of inflation and oppressive government debt. America is addicted to cheap credit, and this addiction will cripple the economy if left unchecked.

The Securities and Exchange Commission sent a subpoena to ChatGPT creator OpenAI in December, requesting internal communications from CEO Sam Altman and current and former officials and directors into whether investors were misled, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the investigation.

The subpoena followed the unexpected firing of Altman by the board last fall, which sparked two weeks of chaos for the non-profit AI startup. At the time, the board said the ouster was due to an internal review, which found Altman was “not consistently candid in his communications with the board” and said it no longer had confidence in him. 

Two weeks after the ouster, Altman returned as CEO, and as part of the deal, a new board with former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor serving as chair. 

Sources say some senior OpenAI executives were asked by SEC officials in New York to preserve internal documents as the investigation continues. 

The SEC enforces laws that forbid people from misleading investors, regardless of whether fundraisers seek capital in public or private markets. The SEC often closes investigations without making formal accusations of wrongdoing. -WSJ

Another source said the SEC’s investigation is a “predictable response” following the board’s claim in its November statement. Another source pointed out that SEC investigators have yet to single out any specific statement or communication by Altman and/or others considered deceptive. 

In December, the Federal Trade Commission investigated Microsoft’s $13 billion investment into the OpenAI. Then, the UK’s Competitions and Markets Authority said it would review the investment. In January, the European Commission also said it was examining the deal, reportedly because of all the turmoil surrounding Altman’s ouster and rehiring. 

The SEC’s investigation might not find any wrongdoing by Altman or the board. OpenAI hired two lawyers from WilmerHale to conduct its investigation into the events last fall. 

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

Texas billionaire John Arnold has long held a notorious position for many in the free speech community as the financier for efforts to establish massive censorship systems in the United States. While Elon Musk has been attacked for his effort to reduce such censorship at X (formerly Twitter), Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook have long pushed censorship efforts, even funding a commercial campaign to get people to embrace what they call “content moderation.” Now Zuckerberg has put Arnold on the Meta Board of Directors in a blow to efforts to get the company to accept free speech values.

Arnold has given millions to organizations pushing censorship systems. The Washington Examiner has revealed how Arnold Ventures has given $13.7 million to five groups seeking to expand censorship programs in the name of combating disinformation.

Among the recipients was the Social Science Research Council, a nonprofit group that runs the Social Media and Democracy Initiative and the project Mediawell. It “curates” news for “digital disinformation and misinformation.” Its site runs studies and articles that advocate government and corporate censorship efforts. For example, one explainer listed government intervention as a solution to climate change denial or disinformation:

The CAAD coalition emphasizes the importance of systemic solutions to prevent the spread of mis-/disinformation. CAAD recommends that online platforms adopt concrete measures to address mis-/disinformation and encourages governments to require advertising technology, broadcast, publishing, and social media companies to adhere to those measures.

The concern is that Zuckerberg has never been a defender of free speech at Facebook and Arnold will only reinforce an inclination toward censorship. While X opened up its files to reveal the massive censorship system coordinated with the government, Facebook has resisted such efforts.

Facebook has long tried to get the public to embrace its role as some kind of speech overlord. Years ago, Facebook rolled out an Orwellian commercial campaign to get the public to embrace censorship. The commercials showed young people heralding how they grew up on the internet and how the world was changing, creating a need for censorship under the guise of “content moderation.” Facebook, they promised, was offering the “blending of the real world and the internet world.”

 

Pending home sales puked in January, tumbling 4.9% MoM (vs +1.5% MoM exp). This was made worse by a large downward revision for December (from +8.3% MoM to +5.7% MoM)…

Source: Bloomberg

That was the biggest MoM decline since August and dragged the YoY sales decline to -6.82%, tumbling back near record lows…

Source: Bloomberg

Realtors gonna realtor…

“This combination of economic conditions is favorable for home buying,” Lawrence Yun, NAR’s chief economist, said in a statement.

“However, consumers are showing extra sensitivity to changes in mortgage rates in the current cycle, and that’s impacting home sales.”

WTF are you talking about Larry?

Earlier this week, a gauge of US mortgage applications for home purchases fell for a fifth week, nearing its lowest level since 1995. 

Who could have seen that coming? As rates surged once again…

Source: Bloomberg

The pending-home sales report is a leading indicator of existing-home sales given houses typically go under contract a month or two before they’re sold.

The index of contract signings decreased 7.3% in the South, the nation’s biggest housing market.

Pending sales also fell 7.6% in the Midwest, but climbed 0.8% in the Northeast and 0.5% in the West.

“Southern states and those in the Rocky Mountain time zone experienced faster job growth compared to the rest of the country,” Yun said.

“As a result, long-term housing demand is increasing more significantly in these regions. However, the timing and number of purchases will largely depend on the prevailing mortgage rates and inventory availability.”

Overall sales are expected to increase 13% this year, according to NAR’s economic outlook, but as the chart above shows, unless rates start tumbling soon, that ain’t gonna happen.

The trend for ‘soft’ survey data is very much not the friend of the ‘soft-landing’ or ‘goldilocks’ narrative peddlers as it slumps from extreme optimism to disappointed pessimism (even as hard data has improved)…

Source: Bloomberg

And today saw more of the same as the Chicago MNI tumbled further off the ‘weird’ spike in November, deeper into contraction at 44 (from 46 and well below the expected bounce to 48)…

Source: Bloomberg

That was below all analysts’ estimates and 3 standard deviations less than expected…

Source: Bloomberg

Under the hood was even more problematic:

• New orders fell at a slower pace; signaling contraction

• Employment fell at a faster pace; signaling contraction

• Inventories fell at a slower pace; signaling contraction

• Supplier deliveries fell and the direction reversed; signaling contraction

• Production fell at a faster pace; signaling contraction

• Order backlogs fell at a slower pace; signaling contraction

Worse still, Prices paid rose at a faster pace…

So, in summary: slower growth, declining production, shrinking orders, falling employment… and accelerating inflation – is it any wonder that ‘soft survey’ data is disappointing – not exactly election-winning headlines.

“Tonight, we radically increased the design goals for the new Tesla Roadster. There will never be another car like this, if you could even call it a car,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk wrote on X yesterday.

And with it, Musk announced the latest version of the Tesla Roadster, which he says will be a Tesla/SpaceX collaboration. Musk said he aims to have an unveil at the end of 2024 and is aiming to ship the vehicle in 2025. 

“I think it has a shot at being the most mind-blowing product demo of all time,” Musk wrote. 

The emphasis of a SpaceX partnership will likely catch the eye of those who have been following the Tesla saga, as Musk once said on Twitter he would like to equip the electric supercar with cold air thrusters.

However, the announcement also means that the vehicle’s production faces yet another delay. Initially revealed in 2017 alongside the Tesla Semi, the Roadster aims to epitomize electric innovation and prestige within the automotive industry. Despite initial plans for a 2020 release, the launch has been postponed annually, now aiming for 2024.

The collaboration with SpaceX includes an optional “SpaceX package,” offering unprecedented acceleration capabilities, including a sub-1-second 0 to 60 mph time, though Musk suggests the car’s speed is just one of its many remarkable features.

“And that is the least interesting part,” Musk wrote about the acceleration on Twitter.

EV blog electrek, which has traditionally been a tried and true supporter of Tesla, seemed skeptical.

“Call me cynical, but the only new information Elon released today is that the new Tesla Roadster is delayed by another year,” they wrote.

“In terms of actual new information, it’s only that Tesla changed the Roadster from its original unveiled, which was 7 years ago at this point, so I hope so, and delayed production to 2025,” they continued. 

“We heard all of that before, so it’s hard to get too excited – even as someone who won two of them as part of Tesla’s referral program.”

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Part of why AI chatbots are so dreadful is we know the corporation / agency doesn’t care whether our problem gets resolved or not.

Click-bait-scary forecasts of hundreds of millions of jobs lost to AI are as ubiquitous as incompetent AI chatbots. Richard Bonugli and I recently took a more nuanced look at AI Job Challenges and Trends, with the goal not of throwing the baby out with the bathwater (i.e. concluding all AI is junk science) but of focusing on AI’s limits in real-world problem-solving.

We can summarize these limits in one question: who error-corrects AI? the intrinsic problem here is data harvesting machine learning–the essence of Large Language Model (LLM) AI and other machine learning approaches–is the illusion of precision: the model selects the correct diagnosis 95% of the time, but who’s going to error-correct the vital 5%?

Consider being a patient with cancer that receives an all-clear/no-cancer diagnosis from an AI processed scan. In other words, consider the consequences of the AI tool being wrong 5% of the time. In the case of cancer diagnoses, a wrong diagnosis can be a death sentence, or it can open a pathway to unnecessary treatments and surgeries.

The illusion of precision leads to fatal assumptions: if the AI error rate is “only” 5%, but the majority of the 5% errors are the most consequential, then the entire idea of basing accuracy on the percentage of correct / incorrect hits is grievously flawed. In effect, AI might be accurate on the 95% of cases with limited consequences and mostly inaccurate on the cases that really matter, but this reality is lost in the claim that it’s 95% accurate.

Data harvesting machine learning is useless when problem-solving boils down to individual cases. Consider a modern vehicle, which is essentially a rolling platform of software. Each vehicle has a diagnostic port that the mechanic uses to detect what system / component has failed, but this doesn’t automatically solve 100% of the problems that crop up in complex machines.

Having a model that predicts the likelihood of the source of unidentified mechanical problems is useful in the sense that the model predicts where to start the investigation, but it doesn’t actually identify the problem with this vehicle. That requires a physical presence and experience beyond any model’s guesstimate. Someone has to actually drop the engine to reach the failed control board. That someone performs both the essential tasks in actually repairing the vehicle: error-correction and the physical work of doing the repair.

The physician who reviews the AI scan results brings real-world experience that cannot be codified in data harvesting.

AI is being touted in cases that largely fall into the service sector such as customer service. (As I’ve outlined recently, the real-world results have been abysmal, simply reinforcing the trend of making customers do all the work, i.e. shadow work.) Digital Service Dumpster Fires and Shadow Work.

In the real world of work, AI can’t actually repair the rotted handrailing or install the piping. AI tools may well offer potentially useful guidelines or help get the needed materials onsite logistically, the but actual work in the field is most cost-effectively performed by humans with long experience.

Another intrinsic limit in AI is the high-touch, low-touch divide. A physician with 40 years of experience recently told me that patients report feeling better after being seen by a nurse or doctor, and we can intuit why: they feel better because someone cares about them and their health enough to actually be physically present. Another experienced physician once told me that he’d concluded many of his patients sought an appointment with him just to have someone listen to them.

These are examples of high-touch experiences that cannot be replaced with low-touch robotic voices and printouts. There are many others. Do you want your hair cut by your barber, who has become a friend of sorts, or a robot? Do you recall with fondness a particular dinner because the wait staff was charming and attentive without being overbearing?

Part of why AI chatbots are so dreadful is we know the corporation / agency doesn’t care whether our problem gets resolved or not. Simply put, replacing human interactions with sterile AI interactions fails at the human level. If we grasp this reality, we realize humans cannot be replaced by AI except at the most superficial low-touch level.

In real world situations, AI can’t be said to “understand” problems. It’s good at statistically identifying the most likely subsets of solutions and presenting those possibilities in a form that can be compared to actual results, and assigning a confidence level to each of its predictions. But this doesn’t mean it’s diagnoses or solutions are accurate or that it’s right in the most critical, consequential situations.

What’s interesting is the really hard problem AI is incapable of solving is how to manage the unintended consequences of its runaway expansion in our global socio-economic system. There is more on this in my book Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power and A.I. in a Traumatized World.

Vision Series: AI Job Challenges and Trends (34:54 min)

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In the real world labor market, 2024 has been a shitshow of layoffs…

1. Twitch: 35% of workforce
2. Roomba: 31% of workforce
3. Hasbro: 20% of workforce
4. LA Times: 20% of workforce
5. Spotify: 17% of workforce
6. Levi’s: 15% of workforce
7. Xerox: 15% of workforce
8. Qualtrics: 14% of workforce
9. Wayfair: 13% of workforce
10. Duolingo: 10% of workforce
11. Washington Post: 10% of workforce
12: Snap: 10% of workforce
13. eBay: 9% of workforce
14. Business Insider: 8% of workforce
15. Paypal: 7% of workforce
16. Okta: 7% of workforce
17. Charles Schwab: 6% of workforce
18. Docusign: 6% of workforce
19: CISCO: 5% of workforce
20. UPS: 2% of workforce
21. Nike: 2% of workforce
22. Blackrock: 3% of workforce
23. Paramount: 3% of workforce
24. Citigroup: 20,000 employees
25. Pixar: 1,300 employees

But, according to the government-supplied data…

The number of Americans filing for jobless benefits for the first time last week rose from 202k to 215k (SA) while claims declined on an NSA basis to four month lows…

Source: Bloomberg

Massachussetts and Rhode Island saw the biggest increases in claims (NSA) last week, while Oklahoma and Oregon saw the biggest declines…

Continuing Claims ticked back above 1.9mm for the first time since November…

Source: Bloomberg

And WARNs have surged recently as claims haven’t…

As a reminder, if you doubt the accuracy of the Biden admin’s data, here’s what the most recent FOMC Minutes said:

“While the recent trends prior to the meeting had been remarkably positive, Fed officials judged that some of the recent improvement “reflected idiosyncratic movements in a few series.”

Even they aren’t buying it.

But, Pantheon Macro expects that to change soon…

“Claims are still very low by historical standards.

We expect that to change soon.

The WARN numbers, capturing advance notice of plant closures and mass layoffs, have jumped recently and point to initial claims rising significantly over the next few months”

Of course, we know the solution…

Dear BLS: you’re going to have to rig state level WARN data next cause it’s, well, diverging pic.twitter.com/YWvyULOqNQ

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) February 23, 2024

Ah, Bidenomics!!