Month: March 2025

A federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction extending a temporary block on President Donald Trump’s executive order which halts funding for transgender procedures for youth under the age of 19.

The order, titled “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” yanks federal funding for so-called gender-affirming care. The EO prohibits federal funding, support, or promotion of pediatric ‘gender-affirming’ medical interventions.

On Friday, US District Judge Lauren King – a Biden appointee, extended her Feb. 14 order in response to a lawsuit filed by the attorneys general of Washington, Minnesota, Oregon and Colorado – as well as three doctors, ruling that the plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits of their claim that Trump’s order violates the Constitution’s separation of powers by attempting to usurp Congress’s power to appropriate federal funds.

“The Court’s holding here is not about the policy goals that President Trump seeks to advance; rather, it is about reaffirming the structural integrity of the Constitution by ensuring that executive action respects congressional authority,” wrote King, adding that the plaintiffs are also likely to prevail in their claim that the order violates the Fifth Amendment’s right to equal protection, which prohibits the federal government from “treating people differently based on sex or transgender status.”

Of note – King, 42, was in private practice from 2012-2021, then served as a pro tem appellate (backup) judge for the Northwest Intertribal Court System in Washington state, and then former President Biden nominated her to serve as a US District judge for the Western District of Washington. She is the first Native American federal judge to serve the state. Amazing.

King did say that the plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge the executive order’s provision on “protections against female genital mutilation,” as all four states are already subject to laws criminalizing the procedure.

Let that sink in – they wanted to allow female genital mutilation in addition to the rest of it…

In a statement praising King, Washington Attorney General Nick Brown said on X that the injunction would allow young transgender Washingtonians to access “needed life-saving care,” and enable medical institutions in the state to operate “without federal government discrimination or overreach.”

A judge just granted an injunction against Trump’s unconstitutional ban on gender-affirming care for youth. It means young trans Washingtonians can continue to access needed life-saving care and medical institutions can work without federal government discrimination or overreach. pic.twitter.com/hbbHYHZzT2

— Attorney General Nick Brown (@AGOWA) March 1, 2025

As the Epoch Times notes further, 

Trump signed the “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation” executive order after taking office on Jan. 20. It instructed the head of each agency that provides research and education grants to medical institutions to take appropriate steps to ensure that institutions receiving these grants “end the chemical and surgical mutilation of children.”

The order states that the U.S. government “will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another,” and vows to “rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.”

*  *  *

Top 5 sellers last week at ZH Store:

• ZeroHedge Multitool
• Apple Cider Vinegar Gummies (on sale!)
• Ultra Testosterone Booster
• ZeroHedge Hat
• IQ Biologix Colostrum

*  *  *

“Across the country today, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions,” the order stated. “This dangerous trend will be a stain on our Nation’s history, and it must end.”

Under the order, “chemical and surgical mutilation” was defined as the use of puberty blockers, the use of sex hormones, and surgical procedures “that attempt to transform an individual’s physical appearance to align with an identity that differs from his or her sex.”

The plaintiffs filed the lawsuit on Feb. 7, arguing that the president’s order is unconstitutional and accusing the Trump administration of discrimination.

“The Order facially discriminates against transgender and gender-diverse people by stigmatizing, defunding, and purporting to criminalize health care that is lawful, state-regulated, medically appropriate and necessary, and specific to their health needs, while the same care is provided to cisgender people for other purposes,” they stated.

Another federal judge in Maryland issued a temporary restraining order on Feb. 13, blocking portions of Trump’s executive orders, including the one titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,”—which recognizes only two sexes, male and female—following a legal challenge filed by advocacy groups.

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in an opinion article published on March 2 that vaccination is a personal decision. He also advocated for immunizations amid a measles outbreak in several communities in West Texas in recent weeks that included one confirmed death.

“All parents should consult with their healthcare providers to understand their options to get the MMR vaccine,” Kennedy wrote in his article published on Fox News on Sunday evening, reacting to the measles outbreak.

“The decision to vaccinate is a personal one,” the secretary continued. 

“Vaccines not only protect individual children from measles, but also contribute to community immunity, protecting those who are unable to be vaccinated due to medical reasons.”

He added that health care providers and local community leaders have a responsibility to “protect public health” and that includes making sure that there is “accurate information about vaccine safety and efficacy.”

“We must engage with communities to understand their concerns, provide culturally competent education, and make vaccines readily accessible for all those who want them,” Kennedy said.

State health officials in Texas confirmed 146 measles cases this past week, including the death of a child who was not vaccinated for measles. The vaccination status of the confirmed cases includes 79 who were not vaccinated, 62 who are unknown, and five who were immunized with at least a single dose of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine.

The child who died on Feb. 25 is the first U.S. death with the virus since 2015, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said. The child was treated at Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock, though the facility said the patient didn’t live in Lubbock County.

The virus has largely spread among rural, oil rig-dotted towns in West Texas, with cases concentrated in a “close-knit, undervaccinated” Mennonite community, state health department spokesperson Lara Anton said last week.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s office said this past week that the governor regularly confers with the state health department and epidemiologists and that vaccination teams are in the “affected area.”

“The state will deploy all necessary resources to ensure the safety and health of Texans,” said spokesman Andrew Mahaleris, calling the child’s death a tragedy.

This past week, Kennedy wrote on social media platform X that the outbreak in Texas is one of the top priorities for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and that the agency is sending Texas 2,000 doses of MMR vaccine through its immunization program.

He added that HHS will provide “lab support to better track the virus causing the outbreak,” will communicate “with public health officials every day in all affected areas to support their response and ensure they have the resources they need,” and provide communications to local communities in Low German—the language used by Mennonites.

“We will continue to fund Texas’ immunization program. Ending the measles outbreak is a top priority for me and my extraordinary team at HHS,” Kennedy continued.

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

US consumers are increasingly dependent on Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP and Social Security.

Personal Current Transfer Receipts (PCTR) and income data from the BEA, chart by Mish.

Q: What are Personal Current Transfer Receipts?

A: The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA)explains PCTR consists of income payments to persons for which no current services are performed. It is the sum of government social benefits and net current transfer receipts from business.

Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP (food stamps), housing subsidies, and Social Security are examples.

PCTR Percent Detail

Personal Current Transfer Receipts (PCTR) and income data from the BEA, chart by Mish.

PCTR Observations

• PCTR tends to rise in recession the fall back some, but not to the previous level.
• This makes sense because of the decrease in jobs during recession followed by an increase in jobs after recession.
• When the decline in PCTR following a recession turns into an increase you have a recession warning but with a variable time lag.

Boomer Demographics and Immigration

Demographics, especially aging baby boomers, increase the reliance on Medicare and Social Security.

Immigration plays into Medicaid for children. But Trump has shut off all benefits for illegal immigrants.

Social Security and Medicare are the big issues. Fewer workers support a growing need by dependents.

Employment-Population Ratio

Employment Population Ratio from the BLS, chart by Mish.

What is the Employment-Population Ratio?

The employment-population ratio is a statistical measure that represents the percentage of a country’s working-age population that is currently employed.

It shows the proportion of people within a population who are actively working.

EPR is calculated by dividing the number of employed people by the total civilian non-institutional population aged 16 and over.

How Does Inflation Play Into This?

Personal Current Transfer Receipts (PCTR) and inflation data from the BEA, chart by Mish.

Real and Nominal PCTR

• Annualized PCTR were $4.74 trillion in January of 2025. This compares to $35 billion in July of 1965.
• Annualized Real PCTR were $3.78 trillion in January of 2025. This compares to $211 billion in July of 1965.

In January of 2025 people got $4.74 trillion but it felt like $3.78 trillion.

From a consumer standpoint, PCTR was overstated by $953 billion, 25.4 percent. However, the impact on the federal deficit was the full $4.74 trillion.

Thank You Fed and Congress

The Fed is not to blame for the three rounds of free money fiscal stimulus that fueled the massive post-Covid inflation.

However, the Fed is 100 percent to blame for its QE response to inflation that created asset bubbles and literally destroyed the housing market.

Inflationary and Deflationary Forces

• Free money and rising deficits are inherently inflationary

• The resultant rise in asset values is inflationary

• Boomer demographics and retirements are disinflationary but offset by rising asset prices and bubbles

• Inflation is punishing the non-asset holders who need PCTR to buy food and pay rent. This is deflationary.

• If asset prices sink, the entire mix becomes deflationary.

Government Dependence Synopsis

We have a growing dependence on government aid over time. The problem is exacerbated by rising benefit levels, inflation, and demographics.

Neither party will fix this. Neither party will fix anything because Congress is corrupt.

There are no fiscal conservatives to be found.

DOGE is a side-show relative to $4.74 trillion in PCTR and the entire budget.

Trump wants more money for defense and will get it by offering something to Democrats in return.

The Fed won’t fix anything either because fiscal policy will play an increasing role and the Fed does not even understand what inflation is.

Understanding Inflation

The Fed, Congress, and the White House have created a two-state economy that bails out the banks, the asset holders, and the wealthy time and time again.

The Fed does not recognize the result as inflation. Meanwhile, both parties support more spending on this in return for more spending on that fueling various bubbles.

Asset bubbles are by definition inflationary. Few understand that because the Fed and economists in general tout inflation as the CPI or PCE. The Fed repeatedly says “Inflation expectations are well-anchored”.

So what? Please consider Fedthink! The Fed Is Incompetent by Design and Can’t Be Fixed

Consumer inflation measures are a very poor measure of overall inflation. By failing to understand this simple point, the Fed has sponsored numerous bubbles of increasing amplitude over time.

Meanwhile, it takes more and more PCTR to keep the have-nots from revolting.

When the bubbles burst, the outcome will be very deflationary. Tariffs may easily be the proverbial straw.

Authored by James Rickards via DailyReckoning.com,

Even casual observers know that gold has been trading near all-time highs lately. The dollar price of gold has been trading around $2,955 per ounce, quite close to the all-time closing high and near the recent intraday high just below $3,000 per ounce. Since November 1, 2022, gold has rallied from $1,650 per ounce to $2,955 per ounce, an 80% gain in 28 months.

Since the U.S. dollar is also near interim highs based on leading indices, gold’s performance when measured in euros, sterling or Swiss francs is even stronger. We expect this trend to continue and to push gold solidly above the $3,000 per ounce level on its way to even higher levels in the months ahead.

Trump: Show Me The Gold!

That’s news in its own right but there’s a lot more going on in the gold space than just the price action. President Trump and Elon Musk (head of the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, and the world’s richest man) are planning to visit Fort Knox in the near future to “audit” the gold stocks and make sure all of the gold is where it’s supposed to be. I’m certain that visit will be the mother of all photo-ops.

Of course, Trump and Musk will not be conducting a real audit in the financial sense. They’ll just look around and show that the gold is actually there. This should lay to rest the rumors and ill-founded theories that the gold is somehow missing or has been shipped to JPMorgan. It hasn’t been.

Make U.S. Assets Great Again

Even this publicity visit has not captured all of the gold news lately. On a more serious note, Scott Bessent the U.S. Treasury Secretary said recently that “within the next twelve months, we’re going to monetize the asset side of the balance sheet for the American people. We’re going to put the assets to work.” There has been so much focus on the liability side of the balance sheet (basically the $38 trillion in national debt) that it’s refreshing to hear a senior official talk about the asset side.

The liberal critics will wail that Bessent plans to sell Yosemite National Park to real estate developers. Nothing like that will happen but the U.S. does have ample assets it can sell, lease or otherwise monetize without invading national parks or wilderness areas. These include mineral and mining rights, intellectual property, airwaves, rights of way, flight paths, and, yes, property development rights and land sales in non-sensitive areas. No one has any idea what all of this is worth, but it’s certainly worth in the trillions of dollars and can be monetized for the benefit of the American people including paying down the national debt.

Gold dealers and gold bugs immediately focused on one particular U.S. asset that could be monetized – gold. The U.S. has 8,133 metric tonnes of gold bullion in three locations – Fort Knox, West Point and the Denver mint – that could be sold. That gold has a current market value of $771 billion. Of course, any effort to sell more than a small fraction of that would drive the price of gold straight down. It would be an immense blunder to sell any of it anyway. The Treasury should be buying gold to maintain confidence in the dollar, not selling it.

Another take on monetizing gold revolves around the fact that the Federal Reserve currently holds a gold certificate issued by the U.S. Treasury in 1934 in compensation for the transfer of gold bullion from the Fed to the Treasury on orders of Franklin Roosevelt (backed up by legislation). That certificate is valued on the Fed’s books at $42.22 per ounce. If the Treasury ordered the Fed to write-up the value to market, that would add $760 billion to the Treasury’s general account, which could be used to finance the U.S. government without adding new debt.

Marked Up Gold: Not A Revenue Stream

Trump definitely wants new revenue streams for the government. I wouldn’t count marking-up the price of gold as a revenue stream. It does produce cash with no addition to the national debt but it’s not really a revenue stream; it’s just an accounting entry. It does produce cash but only on a one-time basis. In principle, you could repeat the process if gold went higher in the future but that’s uncertain and not completely reliable like taxes, leases and tariffs.

Despite the gold bug claims, there is no particular connection between marking up the price of gold (accounting) and selling gold reserves for cash (monetizing). One has nothing to do with the other. The government could sell the gold today at the market price without having to wash the accounting through the Treasury general account at the Fed. There’s nothing about marking up the price of gold on the Fed’s books that affects the government’s ability to sell the gold one way or the other.

Can The U.S. Even Sell Gold?

Still, the issue of monetizing gold has to be put in the context of whether the government can legally sell any gold at all. If you convert the Fed’s gold certificate into Troy ounces of gold (not dollars but ounces), it’s approximately equal to the entire U.S. gold reserve today (8,133 metric tonnes). If the Fed’s gold certificate is intended to be backed by physical gold, it’s possible the government cannot sell any gold without diluting the Fed’s gold certificate.

This is not discussed in economic literature to my knowledge, but it could be a simple derivative of the Fifth Amendment constraint that required the Treasury to give the Fed something of fair value when the gold was confiscated in 1934. This happened when the U.S. was on a gold standard and the weight and value of gold were interchangeable.

That’s not true today. Weight is constant but value fluctuates. It may be the case that the Treasury has to maintain a certain amount of gold by weight regardless of value in order to honor the original deal. If this analysis is correct, that’s extremely bullish for gold. It means the world’s largest single holder of gold (the U.S.) cannot be a seller!

Another idea which has surfaced in the hype surrounding Bessent’s comments about monetizing assets is that the U.S. could sell gold and use the proceeds to buy foreign government bonds that ostensibly produce higher yields than U.S. Treasuries. An alternative is to issue Treasury bonds backed by gold that would (in theory) carry a zero interest rate because they are “inflation proof.” This creates an arbitrage between higher yielding foreign government debt and supposedly zero interest U.S. Treasury debt that produces income for the Treasury.

This idea is nonsense for a long list of reasons.

In the first place, the U.S. already has inflation adjusted Treasury bonds. They’re called TIPS and offer investors a market interest rate plus an adjustment for inflation. An inflation-proof gold-backed bond is therefore redundant. If you like gold, just go buy some. We don’t need to make the Treasury jump through bond market hoops.

The second reason is that gold is not particularly correlated to inflation. In the past two-and-a-half years, gold has gone up 80% and cumulative inflation has been around 10%. Where’s the correlation? The price of gold is driven more by uncertainty, liquidity and geopolitics. Indexing Treasury bonds to gold prices would have resulted in windfalls for investors and a huge loss for the Treasury.

In addition, it’s not clear why selling or monetizing gold reserves has anything to do with buying foreign government bonds. The Fed could just buy them with printed money and the Treasury could just buy them with borrowed money. The gold reserve issue has nothing to do with it.

Finally, the calculation of whether buying foreign sovereign bonds makes sense for the Treasury involves a comparison of U.S. interest rates to German or Italian interest rates. Right now, German interest rates are about two points lower than U.S. rates, so those bonds would have negative carry from the U.S. perspective. That’s a bad deal. You also have to factor in exchange-rate risk. If the euro went down against the U.S. dollar, the Treasury would lose on the exchange rate and the interest rate. That’s a very bad deal.

As mentioned, I recommend gold as an investment asset and own it myself. It’s just not the case that the Treasury has to mess around in gold, bond and currency markets to achieve some opaque goal that can be achieved directly just by leaving the gold in Fort Knox and issuing TIPS.

A U.S. Sovereign Wealth Fund

In the midst of the noise set off by Bessent’s monetization comments was a striking remark by Trump that he would like to establish a U.S. sovereign wealth fund. That’s highly significant.

Right now, official U.S. reserves are about 70% in gold with the rest in a few foreign currencies. The idea of a sovereign wealth fund (SWF) is to allow a country with reserves to diversify into stocks, bonds, natural resources, property and a lot else instead of just holding gold and U.S. Treasuries.

Most countries with SWFs finance it with their trade surplus. Norway, Russia and Saudi Arabia are among the biggest SWF holders in part because of their oil revenue trade surpluses. The U.S. doesn’t have a trade surplus, but we might soon have substantial revenues from tariffs. The U.S. could always borrow money to finance a sovereign wealth fund. Then it would be more like a hedge fund, but that might be Trump’s style. (Scott Bessent was a hedge fund manager for Soros).

I did extensive collections and research on sovereign wealth funds for the Director of National Intelligence when it was a hot topic around 2007-2008. The SWF issue faded after 2009 as it was overshadowed by the global financial crisis. SWFs lost a lot of money in that panic. But they never went away and have recovered their losses since then. Trump may bring SWFs back into style.

Bessent’s asset monetization comment and Trump’s reference to a sovereign wealth fund for the U.S. are critical initiatives that we’ll be watching closely. In the short run, the gold bug and other hype has run far ahead of the reality. In the long run, both initiatives may come to fruition and mark a material reset in the international monetary system

“Anora”, a comedy drama telling the story of a stripper who marries the son of a Russian oligarch, was the biggest winner at the 97th Academy Awards on Sunday. 

The film, written and directed by Sean Baker, won five Oscars, including the prestigious “Best Picture” category, one for Mikey Madison as best leading actress and a record-breaking four Oscars for Baker’s work producing, directing, editing and writing the dramedy.

Anora’s triumph was also a win for independent filmmaking over large studio productions. 

But, as Statista’s Felix Richter reports, despite being praised by critics and winning several awards throughout the past year, including the Palme d’Or in Cannes and wins at the Directors and Writers Guilds Awards, the film grossed only $41 million at the box office internationally, making it one of the lowest-grossing Best Picture winners ever.

However, it is quite common for Best Picture winners to be underachievers in the commercial sense. 

As Statista’s chart illustrates, most Best Picture winners in recent years didn’t make nearly as much money as the respective year’s biggest box office hit, illustrating that commercial success and critical acclaim often don’t go hand in hand. 

 

You will find more infographics at Statista

Prior to last year’s winner “Oppenheimer”, the last true blockbuster to win the Best Picture award was the third and final part of Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings“ trilogy, which raked in $1.1 billion at the box office worldwide and was crowned Best Picture in 2004.

Update (1345ET): It’s real this time…

While we have seen numerous examples of ‘strawman’ headline leaks from OPEC meetings in the past to test the market’s reaction to various scenarios, it appears this one is real as OPEC just issued a statement confirming the outout hikes:

“This gradual increase may be paused or reversed subject to market conditions,” according to the statement. 

“This flexibility will allow the group to continue to support oil market stability.”

The group’s choice may be yet another illustration of the sway of Trump, who last month called on OPEC to “cut the price of oil.”

Additionally, Trump’s renewed “maximum pressure” on Iranian exports could create a gap for other OPEC+ nations to fill.

OPEC’s decision implies “that the alliance is feeling the pressure of underproduction and concessions of market share to the highest cost producer: the US,” said Joe DeLaura, a former trader and global energy strategist with Rabobank.

As a reminder, global oil markets face a supply surplus of 450,000 barrels a day this year even if OPEC+ keeps output flat, as rival supplies – from the US, Brazil, Canada and Guyana – overwhelms growth in consumption, according to the IEA in Paris.

*  *  *

Bloomberg is reporting, according to a ‘delegate’ that OPEC+ will proceed with plans to revive halted oil production after repeated delays, amid pressure from President Donald Trump to lower oil prices.

The surprise move – which immediately sent crude prices reeling – means the group led by Saudi Arabia and Russia will go ahead with the increase of 138,000 barrels a day in April (again, according to the delegate).

Bloomberg notes that crude traders had widely expected that OPEC+ would once again delay the restart, which it had postponed three times since first announcing a supply roadmap last June.

“The optics around any reinstatement of supply, even if incremental and small, will be seen as price-negative,” Harry Tchilinguirian, head of oil research at Onyx Commodities Ltd., told Bloomberg before the decision.

Crude prices immediately plunged back below $70 (WTI) on the headline…

..taking out 2025 lows…

 

It wouldn’t be the first time that a headline was run ahead of an OPEC+ meeting to run stops, and we wonder what’s the over/under on the timing of an official OPEC+ denial.

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

Let’s discuss a theory that the Left learned hard lessons from the election.

Proposed Theory: Academia Is Finally Learning Hard Lessons

Washington Post writer Megan McArdle says Academia Is Finally Learning Hard Lessons. I respond inline in brackets. That is a free link.

The Trump administration is not just trying to get the government under control or save taxpayers money. It is mounting a frontal assault on every center of left-wing institutional power it can reach: academia, the civil service, nonprofits. The object is to break these institutions so badly that the next Democratic administration will not be able to put them back the way they were.

I probably don’t have to tell our readers why this is bad. [Actually you do, but can’t, because it’s a good thing]

Since you know that, [Well, we don’t know that because it’s false] let me make a less obvious and probably less welcome point: The left, not the right, picked this fight. This was politically naive and criminally stupid for institutions that rely so heavily on U.S. taxpayer support. [For starters, it’s completely obvious, not less obvious, and the Left did it on purpose, too. But the following two sentences are things McArdle gets right. It was criminally stupid and politically naive]

It has long been clear that cuts to research funding could be the first step if Republicans were so minded. The student loans and Pell grants that subsidize tuition could be slashed, the tax rules that let elite institutions accumulate massive endowments could be changed, and in red states, government aid to public schools could be reduced. The resulting budget holes would be calamitous in many cases and would filter through the ecosystem even to schools that survived. [Let’s hope so]

Nonetheless, school administrations began issuing left-wing hot takes on news that played to the culture war, and students agitated, often successfully, to de-platform right-wing speakers and punish students or faculty who deviated from progressive orthodoxy. [Another correct paragraph]

Even if you think this was a move in the right moral direction, it was dangerous behavior. [No one in their right mind should believe this was the right moral directions. And academia did not only go along for the ride, it embraced and fostered the cancel culture]

Fundamentally, they took their prestige and public support for granted and seemed unable to imagine a world where the word “education” no longer conjured reverent deference among most of the population. [Again correct, but where the hell is proof the Left learned anything from this?]

Like children throwing rocks from an overpass, they felt protected by their elevated position, assuming their targets could do little but yell back. They weren’t expecting one of the drivers to get out of the car and grab a baseball bat from the trunk. [More accurately, the Left welcomed this battle in the foolish belief that Trump could never win again. Now they whine about the result]

None of which justifies what Republicans are doing now. It is crude, destructive and — like a baseball bat — unconscionably disproportionate. [That statement shows how clueless not only McArdle is, but all of the Progressive Left. Dismantling DEI is 100 percent welcome and needed]

But complaining about Republicans, while emotionally satisfying, isn’t very useful. The institutional left can’t control what Republicans do. It can only control its own behavior. And that behavior, however well-intentioned, was reckless in the extreme. [Complaining about DEI dismantling is further proof the Left learned nothing. They should be admitting DEI was a big mistake and apologize for the mistake. Instead they take DEI out of department names hoping to disguise what they are still doing]

What Lesson Was Learned?

Does anyone get a sense the Left learned anything from this?

McArdle mostly blames Trump. She also says the Left picked this fight.

Thank goodness I can freely say “she” without having to ask ridiculous questions about pronouns. But it was the “extreme-Left”, led by academia, that picked this fight, not just “the Left”.

The average center-Left, center-Right, Libertarian, and far-Right person is sick of Black Lives Matter, ridiculous nonbinary sex theories, favoritism for non-whites, praise for Hamas, college application favoritism, men playing female sports, and all the other bullsheet that the radical Left supports.

Progressive Derangement Syndrome

The Wall Street Journal comments on Maine’s Transgender Madness.

If Democrats want to know why so many voters abandoned them in November, they could take a gander at the progressive meltdown in Maine. On Tuesday the Maine House of Representatives voted to censure Republican Rep. Laurel Libby for posting photos of a transgender high school athlete on Facebook.

The teenager, who previously competed in boys’ track and field, switched to compete in the girls’ pole vault this year, winning the class B state championship. “This is outrageous and unfair to the many female athletes who work every day to succeed in their respective sports,” Ms. Libby wrote on Facebook.

Cue full-on progressive derangement. Lawmakers voted 75-70 to formally reprimand Ms. Libby. The censure means she isn’t allowed to speak or vote in the Legislature unless she apologizes. She has said she will not.

I propose a new acronym, PDSTM, for Progressive Derangement Syndrome. A quick search shows the PDSTM is untaken.

AOC Says She’s Fighting President Trump’s “Illusion of Power”

NPR reports Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Says She’s Fighting President Trump’s “Illusion of Power”

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, says she thinks Republicans have begun making mistakes… and her party is resolved to strike back.

Colleges Cautiously Navigate Trump’s DEI Crackdown

The AP reports Colleges Cautiously Navigate Trump’s DEI Crackdown

In Boston, Northeastern University renamed a program for underrepresented students, emphasizing “belonging” for all.

And around the U.S., colleges are assessing program names and titles that could run afoul of a Trump administration crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

As they figure out how to adapt, some schools are staying quiet out of uncertainty, or fear. President Donald Trump has called for compliance investigations at some schools with endowments over $1 billion.

Others have vowed to stand firm.

The president of Mount Holyoke College, a liberal arts school in Massachusetts, said she hopes colleagues in higher education will not capitulate to Trump’s vision for the country. Danielle Holley said she believes Trump’s orders are vulnerable to legal challenges.

“Anything that is done to simply disguise what we’re doing is not helpful,” said Holley, who is Black. “It validates this notion that our values are wrong. And I don’t believe that the value of saying we live in a multiracial democracy is wrong.”

Many colleges have said they are no less committed to recruiting students of color and helping all students succeed, even if strategies change or go by a different name.

Northeastern changed the name of what had been called “The Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” to “Belonging in Northeastern,” which it described as a “reimagined approach” that embraces everyone at the school.

Here’s the height of not learning delusion.

California Polytechnic professor Cameron Jones said he is worried whether he would still get a $150,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grant to study the history of African descendants in early California, even though it’s not a DEI grant. He also worries about the ban’s effect on his students, especially students of color.

There is no value in taxpayer-funded studies on the history of African descendants in early California. That idiot and all like him should be fired. But that won’t happen.

So instead, I suggest we shut down the entire National Endowment for the Humanities.

Dear Megan McArdle

Where is there any evidence radical Progressives learned a damn thing from this Trumpian revolt?

But it’s not just Democrats who fail to learn.

Lesson for Republicans

Blacks and young adults did not swing the election to Trump because they suddenly became Conservative.

Rather, it was a protest vote against the extreme-Left who hijacked the Democratic party.

President Biden who campaigned on a platform of being a moderate and a healer morphed into the Progressive’s wet dream candidate.

When Biden was finally forced to drop out over dementia (that the Left hid until it was impossible to hide), the babbling word-salad fool Kamala Harris took over.

Mandate? What Mandate?

Despite winning a huge majority of the electoral college, Republicans barely held the House.

Polls do show Trump has a huge mandate to stamp out DEI nonsense.

However, Trump has no mandate for bombing Mexico, breaking trade deals ratified by Congress 89-10, or destroying small businesses with preposterous tariff experiments.

To believe Trump has a mandate to do those things is no better than Democrats’ belief that Biden had a mandate to overrule the Supreme Court on student loans.

Plight of Small Businesses

On January 31, I noted The BLS Confirms US is Now Losing Jobs in Net Business Creation

The BLS BED report provides further confirmation the BLS Birth/Death jobs model is seriously screwed up.

I also wrote about the plight of small businesses this morning in How One Small Business Owner Is Coping With Trump’s Tariffs

Fifty-four percent of small businesses polled said that tariffs would negatively affect their companies, while just 11 percent said they would benefit.

Please read that if you haven’t already.

Bullying allies like Canada and Mexico, and nonsensical tariff theories will backfire.

And Republicans hypocrites won’t do a thing about massive budget deficits.

Neither party is willing to learn anything. That’s the sad reality.

Meteorologists mark March 1st as the official start of meteorological spring across the Lower 48, signaling a seasonal shift toward warmer temperatures and stronger winds. With the change of season, forecasters are warning of elevated wildfire risks across the Southern states. 

The National Interagency Coordination Center, operating under the National Interagency Fire Center and overseeing federal wildfire response efforts, has released new fire risk outlook maps for the Lower 48. The maps show elevated fire risks across large portions of the Southeastern US and Texas through February.

The US Department of Agriculture and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, via US Drought Monitor, shows extreme droughts in the Southwest US, severe to moderate droughts in the Central US, and mild to severe on the East Coast. 

NASA’s Fire Information for Resource Management System, which utilizes near real-time satellite data, shows wildfires burning across the Southeast, including in states such as the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas.

On Sunday, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster declared a state of emergency as 163 wildfires burned about 5,400 acres. 

The scene less than 5 miles from my house in Carolina Forest SC (Myrtle Beach) pic.twitter.com/buI0XpXXPq

— Timothy J Jones (@tjayjones8) March 2, 2025

South Carolina is on fire pic.twitter.com/Gck9w39ddN

— Americana Mama (@AmericanaMama_) March 3, 2025

The good news is that meteorologists say the high-pressure system boosting warm temperatures and low humidity, ripe for wildfires, will be pushed out of the Southeast by a cold front late Tuesday into Wednesday. 

Authored by Daniel Lacalle,

The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s GDPNow model projection for real GDP growth in the first quarter of 2025 (Q1 2025) is now showing a slump to -1.5%. This marks a significant downward revision from the previous estimate of 2.3% on February 19, 2025.

Such an enormous decline is strange. How did we go from +2.3% to -1.5% in less than a month? That kind of collapse in an economy as large as the United States is exceedingly rare. [ZH: It’s even worse now, as we detailed earlier.]

The immediate reaction from the media is to call this the beginning of a “Trump recession” and blame it on President Trump’s policies. Interestingly, on June 1, 2022, the Atlanta Fed GDPNow estimated the second quarter of 2022 growth at +1.3%. By July 1, 2022, it had dropped to -2.1%, a shift of 3.4 percentage points in 30 days. What did the media call it? “Growth scare”. A similar thing happened in the third quarter of 2021. The estimate fell from 6.1% (July 30) to 2.3% (October 1), a 3.8-point drop over two months.

In 2022, real GDP declined for two consecutive quarters under Biden’s administration. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the first quarter saw a decrease of -1.6% in the annualised rate, followed by a 0.6% drop in the second quarter. Hundreds of analysts, commentators, and economists, along with the NBER, swiftly declared that this was not a recession. Thus, it is hilarious to read the hundreds of comments arguing that the Atlanta Fed NowCast means that the new administration’s policies are causing a recession.

As I wrote a few months ago, the United States has been in a private sector recession for months. However, an abnormal increase in government spending during a period of growth and a risky borrowing policy led to a bloated Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

The United States had a $7.59 trillion nominal GDP increase between 2021 and 2024 compared to a rise of $8.47 trillion in government debt. This marks the worst GDP growth adjusted for government debt accumulation since the 1930s.

Many analysts are warning that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) efforts will cause a recession if government spending is aggressively reduced. However, cutting spending may “reduce” GDP but does not harm productive economic growth; it will likely strengthen it.

We must remember that US government spending financed by increasing federal debt accounted for about 22% to 25% of the total US GDP growth over 2021–2024. This extraordinary increase in government spending in the middle of a recovery led to record-high government debt and was the leading cause of money supply growth and, with it, the inflation burst that Americans are suffering today.

A research study from MIT Sloan published on July 17, 2024, by Mark Kritzman et al., titled “The Determinants of Inflation,” concluded that federal spending was the overwhelming driver of the inflation spike in 2022, estimating it was two to three times more significant than any other factors.

Government spending was out of control, leading money supply growth to soar, and the cumulative inflation suffered by Americans in the past four years is over 20.9%, with groceries and gas prices rising by more than 40%.

Excessive government spending was not only the cause of the rise in money supply growth and the burst of inflation but also led to an $8.47 trillion increase in debt and an unsustainable path to financial ruin if policies remained the same. According to the Congressional Budget Office, with no policy changes, the United States would have accumulated deficits of $12.6 trillion between 2025 and 2030. Net interest outlays were expected to grow from $881 billion in 2024 to $1.2 trillion by 2030, even assuming no recessions or unemployment increases.

Cutting government spending is essential to reduce prices, bring inflation under control and stop the looming public finance disaster. By 2024, it became evident that revenue measures would not reduce the United States federal deficit. Deficits are always a spending problem.

We must remember that 2024’s 2.8% GDP growth reflected almost $2 trillion in borrowing, a roughly one-to-one spending-to-growth ratio and a dangerous path to a debt crisis.

Private GDP should measure the economy, as government spending and debt do not drive productive growth. Stripping government spending can give us a more accurate picture of the reality of the productive sector in America. The latest Atlanta Fed estimates show a massive decline in net exports (-3.7%) due to a large increase in imports, a small decline in consumption of goods (-0.09%) but strong services (+0.62%) and rises in government expenditure (+0.34%) and a healthy increase in investment (+0.62%). Thus, the surprising factor is an abnormal slump in exports and a rise in imports that may be revised, because the trade deficit in December 2024 rose to a record $98.4 billion and GDP did not reflect such a massive slump in net exports. The concerning thing is that government spending continues to be excessive, and the United States is running an annualised $2.5 trillion deficit.

The United States will not enter a recession due to the change of administration, but because of the excess spending policies of the Biden years. Reducing federal spending, deficit, and debt accumulation is essential to recover the health of the economy.

Bloating GDP with public spending and debt is not growing; it is the recipe for disaster.

CNN reports that a summit between Presidents Trump and Putin is now being fast-tracked in the wake of the explosive row with Zelensky, which saw him booted from the White House before a planned lunch was to take place Friday.

Last month saw talks in Riyadh aimed at fully restoring US-Russia relations end on a positive note between the delegations headed by Rubio and Lavrov. There was a follow-on meeting in Istanbul, leading to the restaffing of embassies (which had previously seen a tit-for-tat booting of diplomatic staff).

CNN writes in a fresh Monday report, “Whether it was orchestrated or not, Moscow – which reacted with glee to the White House slanging match – is now anticipating talks aimed at rebuilding the US-Russia relationship will continue, even accelerate, in the weeks ahead.”

“Nothing has been announced in public. But, privately, there’s talk of the Trump-Putin summit, always on the cards, now being fast-tracked,” the report continues.

“There is also renewed optimism in Moscow that, with President Zelensky at odds with President Trump and his team, difficult negotiations to end the war in Ukraine will now take a back seat to a raft of potentially lucrative US-Russia economic deals already being tabled behind closed doors,” CNN adds.

US National Security Advisor Mike Waltz has meanwhile warned Zelensky not to test the limits of American patience. He strongly suggested in a fresh Fox interview that Zelensky is fully rejecting the possibility of ceasefire in the over three-year long conflict.

“[Zelensky] is not ready to talk peace at all. Here is the problem, time is not on his side. Time is not on the side of just forever continuing this conflict,” Waltz said on Fox.

“It was really confounding to us that Zelensky could have left the White House Friday having the US and Ukraine bound together economically for a generation,” Walz said in reference to the rare earth minerals deal that was supposed to be signed.

Still, Ukraine’s Zelensky says US support is “crucial” as he attempts to salvage the relationship. After being accused of being ungrateful by Vice President JD Vance on Friday, Zelensky spent the weekend tweeting out a serios of ‘thank you’ messages, and also at one point expressed: “It’s crucial for us to have President Trump’s support.”

Even the Biden administration long complained that Zelensky seemed ungrateful for the tens of billions Washington has devoted to the war effort:

In 2022, NBC was reporting that Joe Biden lost his temper with Zelensky because he wasn’t grateful and he was very demanding.

That’s in 2022.

Wait, the media didn’t tell you about this? I wonder why… pic.twitter.com/Dd43B41IWS

— Insurrection Barbie (@DefiyantlyFree) March 2, 2025

He said in a series of posts on X Saturday morning of Trump, “He wants to end the war, but no one wants peace more than we do.” Zelensky has stressed that he sees this as impossible without strong security guarantees, however.