(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
MAGA is basically the attempt to continue to be in denial about this.
Ironically, reagan had a large number of policies that are now considered to the left of the democratic party—it took two parties agreeing to be in pro-corporate economic lockstep to fuck us over. Such is the risk when you only differentiate parties over culture wars.
And younger voters simply don’t vote as much…
I find the generational bait pretty hard to buy into when some generations can’t be bothered to even vote…
I think this is one of the biggest problems with the US. It seems like it is by design and is very sad. Other nations with mandatory voting seem to have done much better fighting against both extremism and the otherwise overwhelming influence of older voters. Voter suppression isn't an option in these places.
Just two options from two insular parties sucks.
Ah, but boomers are not just old voters. Boomers are also owners and sponsors of faux news that has brainwashed the young men into thinking that maga cares about them - only to get their votes and then revert to serving the billionaire overlords.
The generational issue here is that the old people are actively brainwashing and sabotaging the youth - even outside voting.
I’m old, nobody who owns a media outlet listens to me because of my demographic status.
And still if young people cared enough they could have voted and made a difference, but they did not.
Young people do care but they expect older people to care about the next generation - in a functional society that is. If the young were taught right from childhood that the elders are sabotaging them, they will show up - and it will be bad for the boomers lying to them constantly.
We're on our second Trump administration now, but someone assumed someone else would vote the way they wanted for them?
I don't buy it.
How far back do you want to go? Or do you want to talk about how people got complacent because things under Biden were generally good?
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 changes.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
See: Volcker shock.
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.
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.
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.
Trying to time the market is futile unless you have insider information. Then it's illegal.
Maybe some people are able to predict it but it's not you.
People are trading dollars for shares to shelter from the dollar losing value.
https://www.wealthmorning.com/2023/09/15/648774/meet-bob-the...
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.
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...
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.
ceejayoz•1h ago
NewJazz•1h ago
throw10920•1h ago
rogerkirkness•1h ago
amanaplanacanal•1h ago
cj•1h ago
lenerdenator•58m 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•1h ago
lenerdenator•1h ago
algorithmmonkey•33m ago
vladimirralev•31m ago
0xbadcafebee•1h ago
hackable_sand•1h ago
thrance•1h ago
andyjohnson0•40m ago
dakiol•1h 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•1h 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.
jjice•1h ago
MangoToupe•1h ago
Traubenfuchs•54m ago
Now he is earning breath taking amounts of money by churning out power point documents so I guess his path was correct.
AnimalMuppet•35m ago
triceratops•59m ago
xrd•54m ago
0xffff2•7m ago
dragonwriter•58m 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•57m ago
moi2388•55m 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•45m ago
garciansmith•54m ago
tzs•53m 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•51m ago
So his background in economics probably got him into an economics PhD program.