(For the avoidance of doubt, I'm not saying this is either a good or bad thing)
- low unemployment means the economy is booming, so markets go up
hmmm... the more I learn about the stock market, the more I believe in the limits of human understanding
Is this an attempt to reduce the infamous American consumerism? Also maybe force companies to build more in US but wouldn't that require strong immigration as the unemployment is actually still quite low and those who lost jobs wouldn't be plug-n-play employees for manufacturing jobs that didn't exist before.
You imply that it is already weak, but this doesn't seem to bear out considering current vs historical exchange rates.
This depends entirely on the time frame you're looking at. The dollar is certainly weaker now than it was at the beginning of the year.
https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/index/dxy/download-dat...
https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/TVC-DXY/?utm_source=goog...
The US did quite well economically compared to the rest of the world when dealing with COVID and its aftermath. So some reversion to the mean should be expected, but the timing here suggests it’s policy changes responsible for these trends.
Labor is decreased by launching immigrants down the garbage shoot.
Capital increase by tariffing foreign goods which hypothetically might spur domestic production investments.
Labor being rare relative to capital should increase employment.
But really, no guarantee the capital doesn't just flee to the other 95% of the world where they can import capital equipment needed to make stuff for much cheaper, create a cascade effect, and gut the USA even worse. Especially since we have absolutely no clue what the tariffs will be 1/5/10 years from now.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this chart is pretty much only up...
https://www.politico.com/interactives/2025/trump-tariff-inco...
It shows about $100 billion in tariff revenue growth since May, '25. Interestingly your chart shows an overall growth of $232 billion in the same date range. IOW if both charts are right the slight majority of overall supply is coming from somewhere other than tariffs (though tariffs are adding a lot). I wonder where that money is coming from?
Interest rates are still high. That's why Trump is at war with the Fed.
To do that though requires security/stability, supporting infrastructure, and favorable trade policy. For many years that meant China, but this is obviously changing. SE Asia still fits the bill but is under the spectre of expansionist CCP and shrinking US influence. Few places in the world now have the combination above as well as minimal worker protections and low wages as the poor interior of the US south and midwest.
Ngl I didn't expect degrowth emissions reductions from this administration. But I can dig it.
There are only two ways (yes, it's a real life binary system) to lower housing prices.
1.) Build more housing
2.) Make an area less desirable to live in.
That's it. There is nothing else besides those two.
Also curious where you're at, if you don't mind my asking. The biggest blocker I see here is the concentration of job markets into metropolitan areas (near the centralized money troughs).
One thought that comes to mind is if you could keep remodeling/adding on, and eventually get it to a place where it could get a CoA and become a bubble-worthy house. Kind of an incremental self-mortgage. Not that I don't personally wish to see the bubble smashed to a million pieces, but as long as it isn't, then it is still an attractor.
(yes means yes it was avoided)
Architect/plans/structure permitting? yes yes partially yes (rubber stamp permit)
Minimum space/setbacks? avoided square foot requirements, but there were required setbacks that were legally meaningless since they were smaller than the road easements.
Grid hookups ? yes
Merely skipping inspections, or did you skimp on actual code compliance? skipped inspections and code compliance was not checked.
AZ, area with lots of stable jobs
It sounds like the main cost savings was the square foot requirement? Literally just building less structure?
Then maybe followed by grid hookups, the cost of which would have been higher due to being in a less-developed area with cheaper land? With alternatives these days, grid hookups shouldn't really be required for any house, but the state walks on individuals with all the care of a human walking on ants.
Of course there's also the builder overhead, in that professional developers are making a profit based on what the market is willing to pay over the actual cost to build (due to cheap money loans).
To be clear by "code compliance" I meant building things still to code such that they would pass a hypothetical inspection, as opposed to "good enough works for me". Like for example I'd guess that an electric kitchen range will work just fine off of a 12-2 NM. The code has a large margin of safety because over time problems tend to multiply. I tend to do a lot of DIY electrical (legal here), but I make sure to follow the NEC so that an unexpected inspector would have a harder time declaring it "unsafe", so insurance doesn't have any argument that the work was derelict (not that this really matters), and primarily because I accept that I've got unknown unknowns and I don't want to die in a house fire.
Not having plans meant I was able to figure out how to do everything, including framing etc on the fly. This made it possible to do the project without having to know everything up front which in my mind would be pretty much impossible for a newcomer. I did not even know how I was going to frame the roof until the walls were already framed.
I believe pretty much everything on my house meets code but it was almost entirely built to the absolute IRC minimum.
I believe part of the savings are the fact I took a lot of risks a builder would never take or at least not without a premium, including buying an unproven well share that worked out perfectly and saved me $~50k over havign to drill my own, doing all my own utility extensions ( DIY underground 200 amp power extension and water main are big ones), and buying unproven land without utilities. It took me 6 months to even get electric connected and it was fortunate I was an electrical engineer who was able to work with the power engineers to get a solution to get power for cheap. I worked with the utility to get exempted from their inspections too so they let me wire the secondary side service entry myself and install the service entry hardware myself.
The lack of inspections though are what made it all possible, because I was able to work a day job and do work on the house on nights/weekends and not have to quit my job to be around during the day for a bunch of inspections.
Square footage definitely a big one. The width of the house was the max size of off-the-shelf dimensional lumber so I was able to build the entire house with no engineered lumber and no load bearing structures anywhere in the interior of the perimeter of the house. I also used 6" grouted cmu foundation which is extremely rare (well normal in latin america) but meets code.
But the biggest savigns were probably just that I was able to do everything DIY without worrying about it getting inspected and then having to do it all over again because an inspector disagreed with something. If it were inspected I probably would have had to hire someone to help me.
The 30 year mortgage on ZIRP basically created a ratched effect that locked up the market for 30 years, the only way to unlock it I can think of is to drastically reduce the cost to build a house, you don't even need to hardly even actually build any, just force the hand of current owners by making the replacement cost radically lower.
There are lots of approaches that go that route, like decreasing wealth inequality or suitable taxation.
There is no other approach. You can follow these paths of taxing, regulating, minimum waging, but none of them create more houses and all of them just push the same air around the inflated balloon.
Whether this adds pressure to rental market depends on how many SFH renters convert to buyers - we certainly would be buying at modestly lower prices.
Housing is much more complicated than supply and demand - for a start houses are not fungible. Local conditions are extremely important.
A lot of high house prices is due to financial engineering - for example long mortgage periods at low interest rates. Just one of many mechanisms to make the rich richer by making the poor poorer. Any momentary affordability benefit is soaked up by higher prices, and those mortgages have to be paid off for longer with much higher total payments.
High house prices are also caused by demand elasticity - things like AirBnB, 2nd, 3rd, 4th homes for the super rich, and housing as a place to park funny money (regardless of whether the house is actually being used to home people) mean that normal people can't compete with this non-home demand.
We could go on.
But the only fix is to build more houses.
Regulate all you want. You'll just end up with shadow markets and loopholes.
For instance, if you tax second homes (or third homes, or homes not occupied at least 8 months out of the year, or whatever specific condition you want to use) at 100% of the value per year, you're going to end the purchase of empty real estate to park money, without directly affecting ordinary middle-class people who just want a place to live.
Unfortunately, such a measure would be politically untenable—frankly, even in the 2024 environment, and exponentially moreso now.
The ways to get around something like that are fractal and lead to dumb wasteful whack-a-mole legislation.
So to actually fix the problem, you just build more housing.
Many locales already charge much higher yearly property taxes on homes not owner occupied [1]. Where I used to live my property taxes were ~2k/year or closer to 10k/year if not owner-occupied. Of course most of that increase will just end up passed on to renters.
[1] Look up 'homestead exemptions'.
1) Homestead exemptions, where the extra tax is on properties that are not owner-occupied
2) Taxing vacancy, where the extra tax is on properties that are unoccupied more than a certain amount of the year. (This is the one I was describing.)
Both are worth considering; both have their own pros and cons.
Worry about one's legacy being tarnished is a very not-banana-republic kind of thing.
That's why he hates fentanyl (these places have insane opiate use rates), that why he loves coal (symbolic of the "great days"), that's why he hates immigrants (undercutting wages), why he hates china (that's were the factories went), and that is why he loves tariffs (American manufacturing protectionism).
Watch a video showcasing what West Virgina is like today, listen to what the people who live there say, and you can totally understand what Trump is trying to do, and why these people treat him like a messiah.
I'm not saying Trump is a messiah, or a good leader, or that the people in west virgina (or categorically adjacent places) are level headed. But simply that his plan is coherent if you put yourself in the shoes of the people who are clinging to the past and were left out of the future.
Sorry, but this justification of trumps actions sounds delusional. The only thing that interests him is spineless loyalty to serve his will and looking like the toughest guy at the top of his incompetent boot lickers.
Which sucks, because I know people like Biden tried to pave a way to the future for folks like those in West Virginia by migrating jobs from coal to solar and stuff like that, but I can imagine how that went over.
This of course will depress consumption which will seriously damage the economy but the current administration just does not have the brains to consider these effects.
Furthermore, the immigrant chasing is seriously reducing jobs openings. This seems quite the opposite from the intended effect. But it is done so chaotically and with such cruelty that it is flat out destroying businesses rather than allowing them to hire citizens to replace illegal immigrants.
If you really want to free up jobs for locals, get rid of the HB1 program.
See: Volcker shock.
I mean, these days it seems like he's more of a meme coin guy. [1]
"New crypto token boosts Trump family's wealth by $5 billion"
1. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-wlfi-world-liberty-financ...
He still thinks banks and a strong dollar works against him. While everyone else got more rich, he went bankrupt.
But often they find that combination of worsening inflation and unemployment matched with cutting interest rates is a bad situation to be in. There is often no good way to come out of this. You end up in a cycle of : High unemployment -> cut rates -> employment improves but causes hyperinflation -> increase rates to cool markets -> high employment.
Blunt tariffs is playing a large part. and once Jerome Powell leaves and replaced by a crony is when the real problem will start.
Those of you who experienced Silicon Valley at its height, I hope that this means we get to experience the next iteration of that, even if it's somewhere random on the planet.
Yeah this isn't right. Changing policy can reduce the value of assets across the board, everywhere. It's very possible. The money just disappears because those assets are no longer worth the same in the new environment. Sometimes everyone loses.
If the value of everything changes uniformly, what difference does it make? If I can sell an ounce of gold and buy 1,000 gallons of milk, what does it matter if I briefly have $1,000 or $10,000 in my bank account while accomplishing this trade?
Economics can be positive sum, zero sum, or negative sum, depending on the situation.
But in this instance, if the US is removing itself from the global scene, there may in fact be booms in other places.
How so? Did no one gain from it?
I was gonna buy in when the tariff shock hit, but it started to rebound before I got in. The 40% rise since then feels so irrational (though it's "only" 20% if you ignore the tariff shock).
I feel like I'm about to be my dad - watch the whole climb going "it's gotta come down, right?", capitulate at the top, and then have the bottom fall out.
You’re mocking a well known, risk adverse market investment strategy.
If you're not renetech/a HFT company, you might as well give up on ever finding reliable arbitrage/alpha. You're not a market maker or market mover.
Trying to time the market is futile unless you have insider information. Then it's illegal.
Edit: https://www.morganstanley.com/insights/articles/us-dollar-de...
Maybe some people are able to predict it but it's not you.
But if your dad bought and held when you were a kid he'd be up 1000% now. You simply cannot time the market, ever. But over time, "stocks go up" is pretty much guaranteed. The people in charge won't let it not be.
People are trading dollars for shares to shelter from the dollar losing value.
https://www.wealthmorning.com/2023/09/15/648774/meet-bob-the...
The whole tariff cycle has been irrational move. The tariffs were supposedly "removed" even when it was not - there was always a 10% default tariff. Maybe everyone is expecting a rate cut due to this tariff madness.
I'm not sure what else you'd expect.
I see a lot of stories but not a lot to make it clear if that is the case.
I usually see it claimed with legit job numbers, but then very iffy connections to AI.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45129267
What a nice self-fulfilling prophecy some people have here. Hype AI as a job killer, execs become convinced of the tech before any real results are delivered, use it as excuse for layoffs, something something job numbers, "SEE?? AI!"
This happens a ton on both sides of the political spectrum and I hate it.
On the topic itself:
If you want to bring formerly offshored industries back at scale (a overall dubious plan in my opinion), then high unemployment is a good starting point because it helps avoid labor shortages and price spikes in unrelated industries.
But what CNN reports is too small to have much of an effect on that.
This strikes me as overly simplistic and optimistic. The real world is not a zero-sum-game where if someone loses someone else wins.
Macroeconomics in today's world is an interconnected hot mess where I wouldn't dare to infer much except for that simple cause and effect chains surely do not work.
What you deduce might be true in an otherwise stable and sunny economic climate, but we're far from that.
- Trumps active hand in messing with the US economy (Going on an immigrant (labor) hunt, firing a FED governor and threatening Powell, buying into Intel, imposing tariffs coughed up by an LLM)
- Unprecedented amounts of money are being singularly invested into "AI" and not much else
- Consumer prices for Americans as a compound combination of tariffs and an expected weaker dollar if interest rates go down aren't playing well with peak unemployment
Taking that all in, comparatively to only a couple of months ago, this setup is by far not the most desirable investment climate in the US for foreign investment.
And while bringing back offshored industries sure sounds nice on paper, I'm wondering how that's gonna play out with a) historically high CoL in the US leading to b) higher wages required for the supposed high quality jobs coming back leading to c) high prices to purchase said goods.
I do not think that doing this is a good idea, especially not at scale, and I believe that the tariff incentives as they currently stand are insufficient to achieve this anyway (but "sufficient" increases to tariff levels are unpalatable and infeasible).
> August’s job report also included a downward revision to June, which showed the US economy lost 13,000 jobs that month. It’s the first negative employment month since December 2020, and it brings to an end what was the second-longest period of employment expansion on record.
Oof. This sounds particularly bad, not just for the economy, but for workers, no?
Source?
I see it growing in my business.
The AI gooners who lost their virtual girlfriend/boyfriend when GPT-5 came out, and wouldn't shut up about how awful GPT-5 was for a week.
If OP is right in their mid 2026 assessment, you’re still on the way up.
The need for democratized compute is our niche, and the need for decentralized compute (AMD) is largely unrealized.
I personally get benefits from consuming AI in my own life. I willingly pay for the service. I'm excited to watch it progress and improve.
On the business side, our customer base and usage is growing. We mostly service businesses building useful AI utility.
I'm totally excited to watch this play out however it goes.
DOGE savings: ~$205B, ~$1,273 per taxpayer.
DOGE direct layoffs: ~68K, total federal departures ~178K; corresponding to savings of ~$1.15M per departure.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/12/trump-doge-contract...
Great stuff!
The new unemployment rate is 4.3% That's above the Fed's 4% target for full employment, but not all that high above it.
By contrast, inflation is about 3% -- a full percentage point above the target of 2%, and 50% higher.
Lowering target rates is supposed to lower unemployment and raise inflation. Once you hit full employment, additional money for wages increases money supply without increasing product supply.
The Fed, of course, has more precise models than I've just described. But these numbers suggest to me that the Fed should leave rates as they are; they aren't any kind of emergency or pending emergency. The market is at or near record highs; it doesn't need its bubble expanded.
I know the the Fed is under political pressure because politicians like soaring stock markets. And the pressure is now verging on threats. But it still seems unlikely that the Fed will cave quite so soon when the numbers say to do just the opposite.
"The ELB is not binding anymore." https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CI3o6hi3zF0&t=808s&pp=2AGoBpAC...
Their goal is to keep the economy steady, rather than maximally responsive. Their mandate is for a stable business environment, and incidentally stable employment. They were established to counter the boom-and-bust cycle we saw throughout the 19th century, with bank panics every few years.
They've created a pretty massive destabilization bust of the dollar, with a massive unrecovered crash since the inception of the fed [0].
Not long after the fed's inception, there was massive GDP destabilization[1], and then further boom-and-bust cycles.
Unemployment cycles circa before/after fed don't look terribly different either, especially if you exclude war time. In fact there was a pretty terrible boom-bust cycle about 20 years after the fed's inception. [2]
Which all does have me double checking all of this. We're getting long lag times, one giant bank bust in slow motion except distributed across all of us with USD going to zero, and even after the fed was created an awful great depression which some economists have theorized the fed even made worse.
Moving back to the response time -- it was a genuine question. I have no idea. Maybe the fed speeds up response by having an endless ability to quantitatively ease. Or maybe it acts like a big flywheel.
[0] https://www.oftwominds.com/photos2012/Dollar-value1776-2008a...
[1]. http://visualeconsite.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/Re...
[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/US_Unemp...
Historically the last few decades have been the most stable in recorded history:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moderation
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recession#United_States
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unit...
> They've created a pretty massive destabilization bust of the dollar, with a massive unrecovered crash since the inception of the fed [0].
The "bust of the dollar" is a valid critique if you keep your dollars literally under your mattress or literally buried in the ground. As Nick Maggiulli observed in 2022:
> Hot take: This is a good thing.
> No currency should be able to buy the same basket of goods over very long timespans through hoarding. If you want to retain the purchasing power of your money, it should participate in society via investment.
* https://twitter.com/dollarsanddata/status/159265180975079833...
A follow-on from Barry Ritzholtz:
> Nick is right: Cash is a medium of exchange, not a store of value.
> Leave assets in dollars since 1913, your investing incompetency cost your estate/foundation a 99% loss. Invest cash in stocks, real estate, or other risk assets + your returns are up more than 10,000%.
* https://twitter.com/Ritholtz/status/1593227389156622336#m
Just putting your money into T-Bills would have kept up with inflation.
On one hand, it's beyond clear by now that these numbers are always much more optimistic than usual. We just say June and July revised down to negative 10,000 or so. And even then those jobs are inflated by gig work that can barely make ends meet.
On the other hand, I don't think hyper inflation is the solution to the recession we are seemingly heading towards at this rate. Seems like something is going to give. Sadly doesn't seem to be the billionarires being taxed properly./
The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent".
0.3% is not a large deviation. Here's historical data:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE
During recessions, the number goes to around 10%. That's where it was in the wake of the 2007 crash. It fell pretty much consistently after that -- except for an enormous but short surge during COVID lockdowns. It bottomed out around 3.5% -- below the Fed target, and they raised rates to try to fix that.
They have been changing and adding exceptions to the basket of goods measuring inflation for many years now.
Unemployment statistics have a long series of problems that have to do with considering who is counted.
The current administration is actively putting pressure on the staff publishing these numbers and replacing key stats people.
You gain a competitive power advantage through information asymmetry. It comes at great cost to the overall economy but it seems to be too juicy for politicians to ignore at this point.
the high-level facts are
1.) unemployment and number of available jobs is bad right now, and inflation never got back down to 2% after covid. So Powell made the announcement to lower interest rates. this effect will raise inflation, but create more jobs - which is the correct and more important thing to focus on right now
on top of this, tariffs are making things worse for the average american. based on what powell is saying, the current estimates claim the tariff's alongside the planned increase in inflation will lead to about a 20% increase in prices for the average consumer, but this one time 20% increase is better than having no jobs!
2.) the government has been overestimating the amount of available jobs for 10+ years. A large part of why this is happening is because of the gig economy
an example of what I mean is if you sign up to be an uber driver, uber registers you, the driver, as its own company with US government. this kind of thing is fine for uber, but the government doesn't count you becoming an uber driver as 1 new job - they were counting it as roughly 7 newly available jobs. this is because each new company created in the US roughly brings on 7 employees. larger private financial institutions were correcting for this, but the department of labor statistics hasn't corrected for this. this means banks and private institutions have had better data than the government on the job market for years and were calculating that in to the stock market
3.) to add another layer of confusion, the government calculates the unemployment rate by counting the number of US citizens that file for unemployment checks, but many people found it easier/faster to get a gig economy job in between full time jobs - rather than waiting a 1+ month(s) to get on unemployment checks. this means that the number of people who are unemployed is way higher/worse than what the government is reporting. what this means is that method used to count available jobs AND unemployment are wildly wrong - there are less available jobs and more people unemployed by about 5-7x what was reported this summer.
On top of that, if you look at states where there are stricter/more requirements to become an uber driver, it actually shows the unemployment rate in those states is much higher than expected. the avg unemployment rate amongst these states are probably more accurate to how bad the unemployment situation is in the US overall
4.) the current US administration has fired a lot of employees, which has led to even worse labor statistics/estimates compared to previous years
5.) trump specifically has actually caused a lot of confusion for the average person trying to understand this year's US economic status because we use to have quarterly checkins in June, but as of the past 2 years we've been doing it in July. The way the government tracks important economic indicators starts with the US gov announcing their initial stats, but these numbers often over estimate; so the US gov will often have a large correction the following month
trump this year has been making claims like, "this is the best GDP we've seen in July of recent years!" but of course it's the best because he is intentionally doing the comparison wrong
to ELI5 what I mean, June 2024 had the over estimates stats and the US government would correct them in July 2024. but now in 2025, July is the month with over estimate, and August will be the month we correct the estimates
what we should be doing is comparing august 2025's GDP with July of 2024's GDP. doing so would show you that GDP is not better, but essentially stagnant
trump and his administration are intentionally not doing the comparison correctly for better sounding headlines
[0] dept of labor statistic report- https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf
[1] Deep Dive: The US Jobs Market Is Much Weaker Than it Appears - https://www.financialsense.com/blog/20854/deep-dive-us-jobs-...
EDIT - typos
Inflation is either staying elevated or slightly increasing. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/29/pce-inflation-report-july-20...
The jobs reports are bad, yes, but cutting interest rates is not gonna have any effect there. Companies are actively trimming their workforce or not hiring for macroeconomic/policy reasons like tariffs that have nothing to do with the FED. There simply isn't any meaningful connection between unemployment and rate cuts. No executive is sitting around waiting for a .25 rate cut to hire a bunch of employees when all the other economic data is flashing red. Hell, even the FED themselves say this and point out correctly that lowering interest rates to "help" employment doesn't work especially in an elevated inflation environment.
"When discussing this trade-off, it is important to emphasize that, since the stagflation of 1970s, the consensus position among macroeconomists is that loose monetary policy can easily lead to high inflation without persistent gains in lowering unemployment rates. Therefore, a guiding principle of post-1980s monetary policy has been that it should not be used to try to achieve permanently higher employment." https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/economic_b...
But of course, we have already passed through the authoritarian looking glass and the Trump regime doesn't even bother to lie badly about their justifications at this point. Trump wants lower interest rates therefore they should happen. Anything else is noise.
Big tech has been doing slow layoffs and would be surprised to see much bigger rounds soon as shops shut down unprofitable projects and expect those left to do more with less. The use of RTO and other means to force folks out has squeezed out what’s gonna get squeezed out so now expect a shift to just flat layoffs.
Some of the big tech companies have so many people that frankly aren’t needed. A ton of folks hired into vaguely defined “AI” roles doing “solutions” and product management nonsense that is ripe to be blown up the second the current hype slows just a bit.
Heading into a period where that needs to get cleaned up. It’s not going to be via “AI” (although that’s the PR spin) but just old fashion slash and burn.
1. Tariff uncerainty. Businesses love instability and inability to plan ahead 2. Mass adoption and prioritization of AI 3. Bullying and trying to take over the fed by the executive 4. Large scale downsizing of the government workforce 5. Government contract cuts, which trickle down to the private sector in multiple ways
The executive branch is at war with the world and the middle and lower class of the US. They’re not even doing many favors for the upper class, the decisions aren’t even helping them a lot of the time
FWIW we aren't really seeing any layoffs/downsizing/robot-onshoring due to AI yet. If anything the huge datacenter construction/deployment boom fueled by the AI race is helping the economic numbers.
And Obama's.
ceejayoz•5mo ago
NewJazz•5mo ago
throw10920•5mo ago
rogerkirkness•5mo ago
amanaplanacanal•5mo ago
cj•5mo ago
lenerdenator•5mo ago
Then we went through a decade of stupidly-low interest rates in the 10s, while the economy was doing decently well.
Maybe it was because of low interest rates. Though then you could argue capital just doesn't want to have to pay the price of operating in a borrowing environment where the average person can go down to the local bank, get a 90 day CD at 5-ish percent, and have a nice guaranteed source of steadily-growing rainy day cash, which, in turn, makes it less likely that they'll gamble it on stocks and bonds that capital holds most of its wealth in.
algorithmmonkey•5mo ago
lenerdenator•5mo ago
algorithmmonkey•5mo ago
ceejayoz•5mo ago
The Fed calls workers being able to push for significantly increased salaries an "overheated labor market".
https://www.kansascityfed.org/research/economic-bulletin/ris...
"The same influx of immigrant workers that helped fill job openings also dampened wage pressures across the affected industries and states. At the industry level, sectors with some of the highest immigrant workforce growth, such as construction and manufacturing, saw the sharpest deceleration in wage growth (specifically, average hourly earnings) from 2021 to 2023."
lenerdenator•5mo ago
They need to keep employment high and keep prices stable. Their main lever for controlling these two things is the prime interest rate. They kept that rate low for a long time. Capital now thinks that being able to get money for cheap is the norm. If it can't get money for cheap, well, that's a problem, because capital's mandate is to get more capital.
If you're being incentivized to keep prices low and employment high by this institution, while also trying to accumulate capital for yourself, you are more likely to employ people at lower wages in order to keep prices low instead of taking the hit in reduced capital accumulation to employ people at higher wages while keeping prices low. Furthermore, any sort of sane prime interest rate now seems high to capital, so that additional cost is also factored in as why costs must rise and wages must drop to keep the accumulation rate of capital as high as possible.
Is there anything wrong with accumulation of capital? In and of itself, no, but when you have people with net worths in the hundreds of billions of dollars making the decisions on how to allocate resources for their own continued benefit, well, you get a reduction in economic returns for the rest of the economy.
vladimirralev•5mo ago
0xbadcafebee•5mo ago
That's the "exists-in-a-vacuum" picture anyway. Stimulus, tariffs, a new war, or some other bullshit will change the results.
0xbadcafebee•5mo ago
hackable_sand•5mo ago
dakiol•5mo ago
> Antoni graduated from St. Charles Borromeo Seminary with a Bachelor of Arts.[3] He then graduated from Northern Illinois University with a Master of Arts[3] and later a doctorate in economics in 2020
How can someone get a doctorate in economics when they studied "Bachelor/Master of Arts"?
lenerdenator•5mo ago
You can get a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science or a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science at my alma mater, albeit from different colleges.
Maybe that art was the art of economics, which seems to be more subjective than actual painting.
dragonwriter•5mo ago
While no longer using the Trivium and Quadrivium comprising the traditional Liberal Arts as the sum of the programs, the name of the degrees has been retained widely, and used for degrees in almost any field of study, even while some institutions also offer Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees with other styles (particularly “of Science”). There is no consistent meaning or differentiation to the “of Arts” or “of Science” styles, though they may have signify institution-specific differences in curriculum at some institutions.
jjice•5mo ago
MangoToupe•5mo ago
Traubenfuchs•5mo ago
Now he is earning breath taking amounts of money by churning out power point documents so I guess his path was correct.
AnimalMuppet•5mo ago
dragonwriter•5mo ago
triceratops•5mo ago
xrd•5mo ago
0xffff2•5mo ago
dragonwriter•5mo ago
Some universities might only offer one despite having a few programs in fields where it is more common for degrees to have the opposite style; at one time, e.g., this was true of Caltech which only issued BS degrees for undergrad though there were one or two majors with very few undergraduate degrees issued in fields where BA would be more common at other institutions.
woodson•5mo ago
moi2388•5mo ago
Also, this is his PhD thesis. It’s mind-boggling to me that this is apparently doctorate-worthy, I personally find this lacking even for a bachelor thesis:
https://huskiecommons.lib.niu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...
ecshafer•5mo ago
throw0101c•5mo ago
* https://old.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/1n23ixd/ej_an...
garciansmith•5mo ago
tzs•5mo ago
As opposed to Bachelor/Master of Science, I presume?
If that's the case it because "<degree> of Arts" and "<degree> of Science" don't actually mean what a majority of people think they do.
In the US there is no inherent difference between BA and BS in fields that most people would think of as sciences (hard or social). What degree a given set of coursework earns is entirely up to the school. All of the following exist in the wild:
• BS is the only choice. (Caltech, for example. Even English majors--and yes, there is an occasional English major at Caltech--end up with a BS).
• BA is the only choice. UC Berkeley is an example in this category for math and physics.
• Both are offered, with identical coursework and requirements. You can have whichever you want. Some will even for a small fee give you two diplomas, so you can use whichever seems appropriate for the situation.
• Both are offered, from the same department, with different in-major coursework and aims. One may be aimed toward students aiming to go into research, and one toward those aiming to go into teaching, for instance.
• Both are offered, from different departments. For example, UC Berkeley's College of Letters and Sciences offers a BA in chemistry, and the College of Chemistry offers a BS in chemistry. Computer science can be taken at Berkeley in the College of Letters and Science for a BA, or in the College of Engineering for a BS.
• Both are offered, with the same in-major coursework, but differ in out-of-major requirements. So, the BA and BS would require the exact same science and math courses, but the BA has specific breadth requirements to produce a well rounded education, whereas the BS lets you take pretty much what you want as long as you satisfy the math and science requirements and any general requirements of your school.
Note: since this has "--"s and a list, I suppose I should mention that starting at "In the US" it is a copy/paste (with a minor tweak) of something I wrote many years ago when the question of BA vs BS came up, long before LLMs arrived. :-)
rdlw•5mo ago
So his background in economics probably got him into an economics PhD program.
throw0101c•5mo ago
And his thesis seems to be the only paper he has ever published (unless you count any contributions to Project 2025?). He has one citation to his name, compared to the previous BLS commissioner:
> In reality, Antoni’s “education and vast experience” boils down to one scholarly citation of his Northern Illinois University dissertation on fiscal policy—from the Texas Public Policy Foundation in 2021, during the time that Antoni worked there. McAntarfer’s own research, The Wall Street Journal found, earned 1,327 citations.
* https://archive.is/https://www.thenation.com/article/politic...
throw0101c•5mo ago
* https://old.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/1n23ixd/ej_an...