It's absolutely a bad situation, but I don't really think it would be better if Trump were healthy. It's not like he's going to respond to in a useful way--he caused it.
It's absolutely a bad situation, but I don't really think it would be better if Trump were healthy. It's not like he's going to respond to in a useful way--he caused it.
Yes, that's all that Obama could do. The GOP controlled the Senate. I'm curious what would you have liked him to do that you think would accomplished anything? The problem here was RBG's refusal to retire while the Democrats still controlled the Senate when it was clear that was the correct action.
Exactly. This is a good example of a) people not looking at examples and b) the perfect being the enemy of the good.
I do think you have to do something to avoid self-selection of participants though. Obviously taking the time to do this is less of a problem for some people than others. It would be better, if, for example, you didn't end up excluding mothers of young children. I still think it's a good idea.
Sortition should be used more. But people aren't used to the idea and I think it would take a while for them to get comfortable with it. Not a reason not to try where possible.
On the one hand, one has to be careful saying markets are wrong. On the other hand, it sure appears that markets are wrong. Maybe they think Trump is dead or something.
Also true, but of course you need some sort of standard for evaluating progress. That doesn't mean there aren't other ways to look at it.
It is true that breast cancer treatment has advanced greatly in the last hundred years. But survival of some types of breast cancer haven't changed much and the statistic in the graphic overstates the progress because you can't directly compare the cases found in 1920 with cases found now.
I would say that the judge who ruled against the Spirit-Jet Blue merger likely made an error. Thought so at the time; think so now.
People believe a lot of weird stuff. But there's literally a maxim, around forever, that "the stock market is not the economy". People who believe otherwise are likely to be confused by events. Trump's antics are a separate issue which the market, in my view, has been evaluating incorrectly.
The fact that a number of market indices were at record highs yesterday suggests that many market participants aren't too nervous about anything. See Krugman's recent Wile E Coyote article. But also, the market isn't the economy--you can have good profits and people in distress simultaneously.
Wall Street investors don't appear to be celebrating anything today, actually.
First, see Krugman's Wile E Coyote piece. Second, while there would be bad effects, interest costs are not necessarily one of them--they could move all the borrowing to the short end, or have the Fed buy the long end. This is actually a way to fix the debt problem, but the cost is inflation.
Ignoring the exact details, anything in this vein seems impossible with the current Supreme Court , so you need to pack the Court first, which almost certainly means getting House and Senate majorities and eliminating the filibuster. Need the Democrats to agree on that first.
Too many variables here. Sentiment on MSFT and META was pretty positive relative to AAPL and GOOGL a few weeks ago, and it's shifted back a bit. Could capex be part of that? Sure, but that's pretty unknowable. Also, they are all different but AAPL is not that similar to the other three.
I don't think that's what they are saying. It's economic with the credits. I very much doubt it's economic without them.
This seems uneconomic (don't see how it can possibly make sense without carbon capture credits) and bad (net increase in greenhouse emissions), but fortunately I doubt it will happen at scale, because I think it's unlikely growing oil production in the Permian is going to be economic anyway.
Part of the fun of Odd Lots is the eccentric selection of guests. Mostly they are good, sometimes not. Hard to bat 1.000. I wouldn't have bothered with Truss, who as far as I can tell is not a person who is likely to say anything interesting, but maybe it will be better than I expect.
Just got my renewal for my Prologue and other cars for the coming year. Total for all three is $2100. Prologue almost exactly 1/3 of that. I probably have a better deal than most people, but that's nothing like $3400 for the Prologue.
Hard, because black-letter unconstitutional.
I don't follow NVDA closely, but my understanding is that they had previously guided to zero China revenue. So I would have expected this to be factored in to estimates.
Based on what we have seen so far, I think they will be too late. Investing accordingly, because I think they will react eventually. But the level of denial I hear in interviews of fixed income managers is astonishing. Maybe I'm wrong, but when you have a variant conviction you go with it.
I think it wlll be impossible to adequately undo the damage done by this administration without eliminating the filibuster. Which is OK with me because I think the filibuster is bad, but, assuming the Democrats get a majority in the Senate someday, you have to hope they agree.
Yes. the long term damage, while pretty clearly going to happen, isn't going to be visible or salient to even most involved voters, nor is the magnitude obviously predictable. The way you know it's bad is the historical record of such things across time and space, not observation.
It wouldn't be a good idea either. Why? Do we think the old releases are being mysteriously changed after the fact and no one notices? But I agree, it wouldn't really hurt anything other than wasting some time and electrons.
Exactly. The problem with Trump isn't the economy, at least not yet, and probably never--it's the fascism. Certainly the economy could help discredit him if it goes bad, but if you can't figure out another viable approach to opposing him, you need to think harder or get someone else to help.
I think the big lesson learned from BBB/IRA/DOGE/Trump EOs is that whatever you decide to do, do it fast. The Biden initiatives, which I think were mostly good, were too slow. Too much process. You end up with (for example) a tiny number of EV chargers and states still doing broadband factfinding.
l am happy to (I think) agree that there are many things that you can memorize that are not particularly valuable, and people may value some of those unduly or test for them inappropriately. But I'm quite sure it's easier to string together ideas if you have previously learned and understood them.
I agree with this, but it's also hard to act intelligently in most contexts without memory. There's a reason they get conflated.
They explicitly thought that the electoral college would prevent a Trumplike figure, but that vision of the EC broke down immediately.
Agreed. We decided to try some the other day, and they were fine. Too sweet, which is an odd thing to say about a cookie except they were mostly frosted and that was excessive. I assume they are aimed at people who eat more sugar than I do. Can I make a better cookie? I think I can, but tastes vary.
Does he not remember how this went last time? I assume this will just go down the memory hole when someone points out to him why this is not likely to work.
I think it's a mixture of made-up nonsense and weird ideas that get stuck in his brain, are often distorted, and come out at random intervals. Like raking the forest, or the whole insane California water spigot thing. He does bullshit, but he also does lots of stream of consciousness riffing.
Of course people shouldn't be harassed at all, but a 5% or 10% increase in incidence doesn't really constitute what I would consider an epidemic.
This was something wouldn't be made up if it were 1980 or so; car radio theft was a real problem and there were aftermarket radios that could be slid in and out so you didn't have to leave them in the car. However I very much doubt it's a common problem now.
"Every major conflict in human history." I'm guessing he's an outlier on men thinking about Rome.
If you put the rest into baby bonds in twenty years you'd transform the wealth distribution in the US completely. I mean, the idea that 20 trillion dollars is somehow insignificant is just amazing to me.
Just to be clear, I don't want to expropriate all these wealthy people, but the idea that taxing them wouldn't make any difference is crazy.
Well, let's say its a round 20 trillion (wealth of top 0.1% was around 22 trillion Jan 25 according to FRED). Say it would be possible to earn 5% real on that. That would give you over $100K/year for every child under three forever. Use it for day care, with a lot left over for other stuff.
Sure, but that's kind of baked into the cake. If we tried to get the deficit percentage back to a more normal level (past few decades rather than past few years) in any kind of short time frame we'd have a deep recession. Current AI spend is the difference between weak growth and mild recession.
I think that the US economy is weakening, but not to the point where the weaker job market is feeding back strongly into the rest of the economy; the effect is probably being muted by the unusual AI capex. How long that can last is the most short-term-consequential US economic question now.
Of course both can be true; it's not like people think his Democratic opposition is good on crime. Now I personally think we should contest this, but I can see not wanting to go there, although complete idiocy (and abuse of power) like the DC occupation should of course be opposed vigorously.
I have no brief for the guy, and the reality labs stuff does seem to have been pretty much a complete waste on an epic scale, but he did buy Instagram and build it into a juggernaut. That was a pretty good use of capital.
I think people see him as an unusual political talent, which I think is true. I guess I'd say it's somewhat remarkable that the very substantial attacks against him have not really landed, despite some controversial positions. It is also true that he is fortunate in his opponents.
Before the IPO, it was widely noted that the capital structure of this company was an accident waiting to happen. Then it took off for no obvious reason other than AI fumes. Not hard to imagine it going bad now that the promoters are probably out.
Also a zillion users on multiple platforms. And all this is prior to the question of how the foundation models make large amounts of money at all when there are a bunch of them.
This would imply very nice productivity growth. Be great if it happened.
People expect both to get worse, and they are probably correct (although I'm totally unsure of the magnitude) hence not so happy. Also, the lack of hiring and high mortgage rates vs. recent history is bothering a subset of people.
I don't suppose it ultimately makes much difference, but I'm always curious which of these people are lying and which are just surprisingly ignorant.
I suspect people who don't agree with this implicitly don't believe there are actually an infinite number of branches. And maybe there aren't, but I think as an approximation for any technology we are going to have in the relevant future, infinity is correct.
I mean, you can imagine some kind of intervention where you just replace everything, I suppose, but in the real world the mortality curves are exponential with age and any fixed amount of reduction gets eaten up pretty fast. Totally worth trying to keep people healthy I think, but they'll still die.
That is the task of the anti-Trump coalition, such as it is, in the next two elections. Nothing positive can be accomplished until this is done, nor can the damage being inflicted on the country be stopped. Unfortunately, we should judge candidates pretty much solely on their ability to do this.
Way too many deer. Not enough towns allow hunting on conservation land, and there's often not that much other land that's suitable.
Not to be disagreeable, but I'm sure he can open up a couple of grocery stores if he wants to, which is all he said he would do. The mayor of NYC does not have the power to make buses (he didn't say public transportation) free, although of course he would be in a position to advocate for that.
The problem here isn't the upfront cost of the robot. If you accept their assumptions, it has an NPV of $200K, so if it costs less than that, it's profitable to use it. The question is whether those assumptions about operating cost and about their effectiveness as human substitutes are correct.
He really isn't, or at least his policies aren't. But that's still way ahead of Trump's brand of ignorant, crazy, narcissism.
Maybe not everyone, always. But it's a good way to bet.
I don't think it's that surprising. They are going to underperform in bull markets and people hate that and it's mostly been a bull market for a long time. But yes, they make sense as part of a portfolio if you can stand the potentially long periods of apparent uselessness.
I think that ship sailed a long time ago.
This is the key point. It's already happening, but if we leave it to the private market we're likely to be worse off. This is a classic example of something that it doesn't make sense to privatize because there's not going to end up being a market for the service that normal people can influence.
But yes, the only plausible way to fix this is by court-packing, and I don't see it happening.
That's true. The whole course of Supreme Court jurisprudence on this topic since Buckley v Valeo has been disastrous. Not to mention the separate but related inability to regard anything without an obvious quid-pro-quo regarding a specific official act as corruption.
It's weird to deny the relevance of something that's obviously relevant. Maybe an issue is that an individual's charm isn't universal--I find Trump repulsive, but it's obvious he has a weird appeal to many people. But it's obvious that there was a difference between Kennedy and Nixon, for example.
And I would say he has pretty much chickened out with respect to China, because he does not in fact have all the cards in that relationship.
We are, but to me the actual question is what happens when (or, to be fair, if) there are more consequences. Up until now, the post April-chickening-out environment hasn't required any further CO.
Inflation may be mildly elevated, but it's rising not falling. The job market is getting worse, but unemployment is 4.2%. and labor supply is (at best) not rising much. It's not obvious to me that cuts are appropriate. There will be a lot more information in September, and the Fed can decide then.
Blowing up the taxi cartel was good, not just because it was a cartel, but because the technology was antiquated and provided (in most places) poor service. But that doesn't imply that the circumventing regulation playbook is good in general, just that taxi regulation was especially bad.
It seems obvious that there's some extra dimension to that relationship, and it's clear it was disturbing his staff during the campaign. It could be straightforward sex, it could be something odder. We know Trump isn't really capable of normal human relationships, so it's probably weird in some way.
We know it's going to break. The question is whether it breaks before the end of winter, and although I have an opinion on that, I think it's pretty uncertain.
Honestly, the idea that a magic ratio is a key to aesthetics would not be unfamiliar to ancient Greeks.
The bizarre thing about all this is that if the smoothed GDP were growing at 3%, it's very unlikely lowering rates would be a good idea. The actual economy is slowing and (if it weren't for the price uncertainty from the tariffs) would be a reasonable argument for lowering rates.
There should be a standard playbook for dealing with rogue police forces. It doesn't come up that often, but it would be helpful when it does come up. I'm not going to pretend to be familiar with the South Yorkshire police, but these facts are appalling.
Hot weather sets off market meltdown! Epstein scandal morphs into stock selloff! People writing nonsense causes equity earthquake!
Midwest has apparently seceded.
I wouldn't run Cooper in NYC, and I wouldn't run Mamdani in NC. And I don't see any problem with that.
Right now I'm doing the Chuck Prince dance and tossing in some diversification/hedging.
I don't know how useful these raw comparisons are; there are such big differences between the US and other markets, or between the US now and the US past. Certainly the US market is aggressively priced, very likely partly because of the passive bid, but unclear to me what the response should be.
I don't want to ban any of it. I would very much like to ban advertising for gambling and gambling-adjacent stuff. Also, having it on people's phones is obviously bad, but it's unclear to me what it makes sense to do about that.
I do not agree with this. I find them very useful in some contexts. But of course in general they have negative expected value. People who use them as a primary investment vehicle have a considerable headwind. And if they do make money, the tax treatment isn't advantageous.
Note that I do think there will be another chance, but it's very unclear when Democrats will have a Senate majority again.
No disagreement with you here, but just an opportunity to point out that the BEAD process that was put into place for states to get broadband money has made the whole thing slow and caused so little to be done. Much like EV chargers. Hopefully we will learn from this if we ever get another chance.
Most of the commercial plans for LLMs I've seen explicitly say they won't retain sessions for training. But an LLM "therapist" presumably would want to store context so you don't have to repeat the story about your childhood trauma every time you have a session.
Didn't know this. Can't stop playing the oldies.
The fact that anyone knows or cares who Cathie Wood is, is a tribute to her skill at marketing.
A problem is that Trump is old. Ignoring the other issues that raises, it means that his bugaboos are not relatable for a large segment of the population. Bill Clinton is basically Alger Hiss. Conservatives were constantly on about him when I was a kid but it was only of historical interest to me.
Depends what you mean. A lot of the results have been good, even excellent, but the expectations seem to have been highish and speculation is rampant. From an economy-wide perspective, not much there to worry about yet, maybe next quarter? For the market, it's a bit iffy, but so far it's been fine.
Dogs contain multitudes.
Everything we know about the Trump administration makes it seems unlikely that you can make any kind of binding agreement with them. Of course, we can't be sure what will happen here, but I know which way I'd bet.
I don't think it's worse than it was before. In my view, what risked the brand value was burying the links you wanted under the sponsored links. Now they very possibly tell you what you want to know at the top. Maybe it was insufficient, but a lot of times the first link you check is too.
I suppose you are right, but I literally cannot get myself into the headspace of these people.
Weren't corporate taxes already quite low--the accelerated depreciation would seem like it could only raise the ROI on a fixed investment by a couple of points. Of course, that's not nothing, but one wonders about the magnitude of the effect.
Also, such a weird obsession. I mean, OK, this is not true, but what if it were? Why would I care? Is there some kind of first lady Olympics she's got an unfair advantage in? I don't get it at all.
The only way to do that is to pack the Supreme Court. Which wouldn't necessarily be a bad idea, but I'm not holding my breath.
As well they should. It's really hard to figure out exactly what's happening with all the relevant tariff rates, but it looks like there's probably going to be a negative effective rate of protection against Japanese cars.
I don't think this is important, which is good because it seems very unlikely to happen. If at some time the government wants to try to remove SpaceX from Musk's control on any of numerous possible grounds, that might be a good idea. Also possible SpaceX will implode as Starship keeps exploding.
Pretty wimpy printing; doesn't seem much higher than NGDP. Of course we don't have q2 gdp, but 2024q1-2025q1 was up about 4.8%.
Some people dehumanize others; this guy spends every waking hour dehumanizing himself. Honestly he is going to get the condign punishment, which is to the extent he succeeds in living longer, he's going to have to be himself that much longer. It's a twisted version of the Tithonius myth.
This is obviously wrongheaded, and I'm sure it's different in different parts of the country, but I very much doubt you could get a home health worker for less than the federal minimum wage anywhere near me.
I think you are responding to something I didn't say. I made no comment on the future course of the US economy. I was making the observation that the number of deportations thus far is not large enough to have a meaningful effect on the workforce.
They haven't done that. Maybe they will, certainly it seems they would like to, but the number of people they've deported so far is insignificant relative to the size of the workforce.