[The Soup Nazi]

A guide to the friends and patrons of Clarence and Ginni Thomas

These are the associates of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, Ginni, who have given gifts, made payments or otherwise supported the couple based on recent reporting from various news outlets

[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

abortion is an ugly word, nobody is "for abortion" really

True. Now, "reproductive rights" will fly before a Democratic audience, but to the general masses I think the best would be "your right to choose what you do with your own body". Too long? "My body, my choice" does fit on the front of a cap...

(SCOTUS owes me whatever time I spent typing that, by the way.)

[The Soup Nazi]

How Democrats' abortion ads used personal stories, attacks to win voters

[The Soup Nazi]

I was revisiting some old-ish folders in my computer and found this little nugget... Kinda odd that (apparently) I never shared it here. Maybe I didn't wanna be un-PC. Eh.

 

[!@#$%!]

watched the argentinian debate. milei was clumsy as fuck, but massa, goddamn, he lies like he breathes. one sneaky motherfucker if i ever saw one. 100% shameless, looked into the camera and appealed affectionately to the simples, wrapped himself in the flag of nationalism, promised a 3 card monte of economic solutions.

meanwhile, hapless milei struggled to explain economic theories in 90 second bursts and fell into the trap of replying to massa's police interrogation tactics.

second block milei did better resisting massa's tactics and massa resorted to the dirty trick of making insinuations about milei's student days with info apparently dug by intelligence agencies because how else would he know where milei did his student internship and why it wasn't renewed (lmfao).

my debate summary is: clumsy oaf vs disgusting snake.

if kirchnerism wins again the cartels will take over though. argentina currently has a 50% poverty rate, 150% inflation, there are not many options left to the desperate.

---

also been watching some footage from gaza. i'm stuck on a preverbal stage with all that.

[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

inflation? it's global! and the usa has the best economy in the world right now. so what do people expect?

 

New perspectives on the feel-bad economy

Feelings about the economy are a partisan thing

By Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist

Almost two years have passed since I began trying to draw people’s attention to the widening gap between economic perceptions and economic reality. At the time the economic picture was mixed, with rapid job growth yet also rising inflation; even given that mixed picture, consumer sentiment seemed abnormally low.

I think it’s fair to say that I encountered a lot of pushback. Inflation was, after all, rising, and many economists warned that getting it back down would require a punishing recession.

But it didn’t. Unemployment is still near a 50-year low, yet inflation has been falling fast; consumer prices didn’t rise at all in October, although that was partly statistical noise. Many economists who crunch the data are almost giddy with how well things are going; the latest big report from Goldman Sachs (whose economists got disinflation right) is titled “The Hard Part Is Over.”

Yet surveys of consumer sentiment and political polls continue to show that Americans have a very negative view of the Biden economy. There’s still no consensus about the reasons for this disconnect. But there are some new studies that shed some light on what’s going on, and I have a new way of looking at the numbers that may also clarify things.

Let me start with a picture from Briefing Book, a blog written by former government staffers. They have put together a model (actually, several models) that lays out the historical relationship between fundamentals like inflation and unemployment on one side and consumer sentiment on the other. Until the pandemic, models like this worked pretty well; but at this point, consumers appear to be far more pessimistic than they “should” be:

 

I’ll come back to their explanation of the gap. First, however, never mind aggregate economic statistics: What’s happening to workers?

For a while, many pundits were insisting that whatever might be happening to G.D.P., the fact was that wages weren’t keeping up with inflation — which was true, for a while. But not anymore. I already more or less knew this from work by Amherst’s Arin Dube, but a new, comprehensive analysis by Joseph Politano really drives the point home. By any measure, real wages now are higher than they were before the pandemic; for nonsupervisory workers, who make up the majority of the work force, they’re higher than you would have predicted from the prepandemic trend.

But never mind these numbers. Americans say that things are bad; shouldn’t we take them at their word?

One answer is: Look at what they do, not at what they say. As it happens, the plunge in consumer sentiment during the Biden years has been similar in magnitude to the plunge during and after the 2008 financial crisis — which is itself a remarkable observation, given that the post-2008 slump dragged on for years, while after Covid we rapidly returned to full employment. However, consumer spending, which stalled during the last crisis, has just kept powering along this time. Here’s a table, with all variables shown as percentage changes from the start date:

 

So consumers may say that it’s a lousy economy, but their spending suggests that they’re feeling quite good about their personal financial situations. I guess they believe bad things are happening, but only to other people.

Anyway, the analysts at Briefing Book delved into one possible reason for this disconnect, which I speculated about right from the start — but they’ve done the math. It’s now a well-established fact that partisan orientation affects expressed views about the economy: Democrats are more positive when a Democrat holds the White House, Republicans more positive when the president is a Republican. What Briefing Book shows is that this effect isn’t symmetric: It applies to both parties, but the partisan effect on sentiment is two and a half times as large for Republicans as it is for Democrats.

And it estimates that this “asymmetric amplification,” all by itself, accounts for 30 percent of the gap between economic sentiment and economic fundamentals.

Wait, there’s more. The importance of partisanship in shaping economic perceptions tells us that a lot of what people say about the economy reflects what they hear, either from news organizations or on social media, rather than their own experiences. And it’s a running joke among economists I talk to that even mainstream news organizations apparently find it hard to say nice things about the Biden economy. When, say, a new employment report comes in, the headlines don’t usually say things like “Job growth comes in above expectations”; they’re more likely along the lines of, “Rapid job growth may slow soon, experts say, posing problems for Biden.”

You might say that such things can’t really matter, that people know what’s really happening. But the evidence on partisanship and perceptions suggests otherwise.

Now, I’m not saying that this is the whole story. Inflation may be slowing, but prices have risen a lot in recent years, and that still upsets people — although as I noted last week, that anger didn’t seem to last after previous temporary bursts of inflation. And general malaise over the social impacts of the pandemic may be bleeding into what people say about the economy.

Still, we can acknowledge that there are other factors at work without denying two clear facts about the economy: Most American workers are, in fact, better off than they were in the past, and a significant part of negative economic commentary reflects partisanship, not reality.

Oh, and one other point: Negative economic sentiment may not matter as much for the 2024 election as many think, since a lot of it is coming from people who would never vote for a Democrat under any conditions.


Quick Hits

Inflation distributions (they’re looking good).

The markets are happy.

Shelter prices are a lagging indicator — and they’re all that’s left.

It’s looking even better for low-wage workers.

[!@#$%!]

i lack the expertise and analytical power and academic credentials of krug & co., but yep, that's more or less what i've been saying all along from my ignorant observations xD

[The Soup Nazi]

"Hey, it's tough out there. People are struggling. Now let's get another iPhone."

[The Soup Nazi]

RIP Argentina. OK, maybe it was already dead. Now it's a... zombie?

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by The Soup Nazi

RIP Argentina. OK, maybe it was already dead. Now it's a... zombie?

fuck no, not rip. argentina gets a chance to live again.

rest in pieces the peronist kleptocracy from hell

i think milei has been miscast as "ultra right wing" and suffered some unfortunate and inapt comparisons made up by foreign journalists.

if you actually listen to the guy he has his very clear philosophy. and he derives his conclusions from clear principles. he gets called a populist but he's not a populist. massa was the actual populist!

now you don't have to agree with him 100%, i certainly don't, and there is no chance in hell he'll get 100% of his agenda passed and enacted anyway.

but if he can just fix the currently pitiful argentinian economy, and reverse the spiral into misery they've been trapped into, like a turd spinning in a flushing toilet on its way to the sewer, then that will be an extraordinarily good deed, historically.

argentina was on its way to deeper levels of failure had kirchnerism won again. massa said "entre vos y yo" in the debate but he cannot get rid of his filthy rotten baggage. i mean, he's the current finance minister! the gumption!

a failing state benefits nobody. not its citizens, nor its neighbors.

are you hosting any venezuelan refugees in your house, by any chance?

[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

are you hosting any venezuelan refugees in your house, by any chance?

Come on.

By the way, you were the one who said "that clown is too much clown" regarding Milei. But you're right that the alternative wasn't acceptable - unless there's a gigantic boycott going, no administration can defend a policy that drives a country to over 100% inflation.

All in all, I do not see anything good in store for our neighbors.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by The Soup Nazi

Come on.

By the way, you were the one who said "that clown is too much clown" regarding Milei. But you're right that the alternative wasn't acceptable - unless there's a gigantic boycott going, no administration can defend a policy that drives a country to over 100% inflation.

All in all, I do not see anything good in store for our neighbors.

i see what you quoted but i cannot find the original source you quoted so i can't see my entire comment in context.

anyway, no matter, it still makes sense to me. because:

1) i stopped listening to the "reports" and actually listened to the guy. i have changed my mind about him,

2) even though i changed my mind about him, i can see how some of his proposals don't sit well with mainstream voters. and even though jxc did not win as i expected (probably condemned by macri's former failure) they still are in a coalition with him. which is bound to move him closer towards economic orthodoxy.

i am fairly hopeful about his gubmint. liberalizing that disgraceful ruin of an economy is important. they are going to need a shock treatment, which will be hard, but that is preferrable to a slow but certain death. it wasn't even so slow anymore... the decline has been too quick lately, as a matter of fact.

anyway, here's to the end of populism of all stripes in latin america...

[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

anyway, here's to the end of populism of all stripes in latin america...

I'm afraid it's looking bleak as fuck. Kast keeps gaining ground here... Ortega (guy's still alive?) pulled Nicaragua out of the OAS (OEA)... I wanna go live with the penguins...

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by The Soup Nazi

I'm afraid it's looking bleak as fuck. Kast keeps gaining ground here... Ortega (guy's still alive?) pulled Nicaragua out of the OAS (OEA)... I wanna go live with the penguins...

is kast making you miss frei and ailwyn as your main opponents?

i remember when dubya (fucking dubya! gog and magog and all that shit!) suddenly started to look like a being of light next to the orange beast...


well, i don't know what to tell you.

[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

is kast making you miss frei and alwyn as your main opponents?

i remember when dubya (fucking dubya! gog and magog and all that shit!) suddenly started to look like a being of light next to the orange beast...

well, i don't know what to tell you.

I was never opposed to Aylwin (not that it mattered much to society - I couldn't even vote yet ). The so-called transition was a scary time, man. After that, Frei was one boring president - everything seemed just... grey... Anyway, my "opponents" were always the right: RN and UDI fucks, who are still fucks but yes, today they seem at least mentally sane compared to Cacast.

[_tunic_]

Originally Posted by The Soup Nazi

RIP Argentina.

R.I.P. Netherlands too
there were elections today. The first exitpoll has just arrived (it's 9PM here):
Geert Wilders' right wing PVV party is the big winner. He's doubled his seats in the congress



help!!




Let's see what the parliament will be like, and who's going to be the new prime minister, and how long it will take too. Most of the other parties do not want him to be it. nor do they want to form a coalition with his party.

[The Soup Nazi]

From The New York Times:

Bidenomics and the guys in the bar

Voters may feel one way, but the economy itself feels fine

By Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist

Ten finance guys are drinking in a bar. Nine of them are Masters of the Universe — wheeler-dealers who make many millions of dollars every year. The tenth is what Gordon Gekko, in the movie “Wall Street,” called a “$400,000-a-year working Wall Street stiff.”

Then the stiff leaves for a while, maybe to answer a call of nature. When he leaves, the average income of the guys still in the bar shoots up, because he’s no longer dragging that average down; when he comes back, the average drops again. But these fluctuations in the average don’t reflect changes in anyone’s income.

Why am I telling you this story? Because it’s most of the story of wages in the U.S. economy since Covid-19 struck. In 2020 the average wage of workers who still had a job shot up, because those who were laid off were disproportionately low-wage service workers. Then, as people resumed in-person shopping, started going to restaurants and so on, growth in average wages was held down because those low-wage workers were being rehired. You need to look through these “compositional effects” to figure out what was really happening to earnings as that played out.

Until recently I thought everyone — well, everyone following economic issues — knew this. (Assuming that people know more about the numbers than they actually do is an occupational hazard for nerds who become pundits.) But lately I’ve been seeing even mainstream news organizations publish charts that look like this:

 

And these charts are accompanied by commentary to the effect that real wages generally rose under Donald Trump but have generally fallen under Joe Biden, which in turn is supposed to explain why Americans are feeling so negative about the economy.

But that’s not what these charts actually tell us. Mostly they reflect the working stiff temporarily leaving the bar, then coming back.

There are wage measures that try to adjust for changes in the mix of workers, like the Atlanta Fed’s wage growth tracker. If we use this measure instead of average wages, the picture looks like this:

 

The spurious wage surge of 2020 is gone, as is the wage stagnation of early 2021. It’s still true that wages lagged behind inflation in 2021 and 2022, but they have run well ahead of inflation this year.

Even this view of economic performance, however, misses some of the temporary distortions caused by the pandemic. Prices of many commodities were very low in 2020 — the price of oil briefly went negative! — not because policy was good but because the world economy was flat on its back, depressing demand. These prices surged as the economy recovered, and there were also large but temporary disruptions to supply chains — remember all those ships waiting for someplace to unload their cargoes?

Oh, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine brought war to one of the world’s major food-producing areas.

In the end, it’s basically a fool’s errand to try and compare economic performance before and after the White House changed hands; there was just too much crazy stuff going on. What we can say, with considerable certainty, is that while prices have gone up a lot since the pandemic began, most workers’ wages have risen significantly more:

 

OK, at this point one runs into a buzz saw of criticism. I am regularly assured by correspondents that economists’ measures of inflation are meaningless, because they exclude food and energy. No, they don’t; economists often use measures of “core” inflation for analytical purposes, but the Consumer Price Index, which is what I’m using here, includes everything.

Or I’m told that real people know that inflation is still running hot, whatever the government numbers may say. Actually, the American Farm Bureau Association, a private group, tells us that Thanksgiving dinner cost 4.5 percent less this year than last. Gasbuddy.com, another private group, tells us that prices at the pump are down more than 30 percent since their peak last year. Neither turkeys nor gas prices are good measures of underlying inflation, but both show that the narrative of inflation still running wild is just not true.

Sorry, folks, but “immaculate disinflation” — rapidly falling inflation without a recession or a big rise in unemployment — is actually happening. The 2021-22 inflation surge definitely rattled Americans after decades of relative price stability, and I’m not here to lecture people about their feelings. But I guess I am here to lecture journalists about using statistics. Presenting misleading numbers that seem to justify public opinion is actually an act of disrespect: Voters have a right to their feelings, but journalists have a duty to present the facts, as best we can understand them.

And while the public’s negative view of the economy is a major puzzle, acknowledging that puzzle is no reason to soft-pedal the evidence that the U.S. economy is currently doing very well — indeed, much better than even optimists expected a year ago.


Quick Hits

Claudia Sahm makes the case for financial progress at greater length.

How the Feds bounced Binance.

Ignoring your mother’s advice and losing money on crypto — when your mother is president of the European Central Bank.

Unions are raising nonunion wages.

[!@#$%!]

^^ good piece by krug

but it is also true that prices have risen in many cases 30% from before the pandemic

but of course, we had a goddamn pandemic, and supply shocks, and war, the works

there is a pundit's war to shape how voters feel about the economy

i can't see who is winning, or where things will be come october (when people start voting)


bitcoin was back to 38k today it seems. still has no intrinsic value and its transactional value is very limited. but here we go again... always some fucking mania going on

[!@#$%!]

well, shit, henry kissinger just died, aged 100. i watched his 90m interview on bloomberg just the other day. he looked like shit, his head was sitting on the middle of his chest, but he was still brilliant and erudite, just a bit slow talking, understandably.

his legacy isn't one of purity, clearly. he was an architect of american foreign policy during the cold war, he's never gonna be remembered as a holy santo, some people will be dancing/pissing on his grave for sure, but i think his mind was a valuable resource in recent times when neocons and the deranged have done much worse than he ever did. he was still working on some books, he said in the interview. i might pick some up.


charlie munger was also reported dead today, aged 99, another storehouse of erudition. go watch him on youtube and have a good laugh with all the clever things he said about business, the financial system, creative accountants, private equity, active trading, etc, etc. he was a reasonable republican! for universal healthcare and for green energy (but green energy not for the reasons you think). a big loss for 'merica and for anyone who strives to get rid of stupid ideas on a daily basis.

[choc e-Claire]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

some people will be dancing/pissing on his grave for sure

Cheers!