Kevin Drum 🕸

The Associated Press reports today on "The Great Grift," a combination of the plundering of COVID-19 aid programs by fraudsters and plain old mistakes in doling out the money: All of it led to the greatest grift in U.S. history, with thieves plundering billions of dollars in federal COVID-19 relief aid intended to combat the ...continue reading "AP estimates fraud and mistakes in pandemic programs cost $300-400 billion"

Eric Levitz makes an interesting point today about Donald Trump and his obsession with holding onto classified documents. The Department of Justice, far from indicting him for political reasons, actually went easy on him: In January of last year, in response to a subpoena, Trump returned 197 classified documents to the federal government. Despite his ...continue reading "The Department of Justice went easy on Trump"

A few days ago we learned that US spy agencies knew in advance of plans by Ukraine to bomb the Nord Stream pipeline. Today there's more. We not only knew about it, we warned Ukraine not to do it: The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency warned the Ukrainian government not to attack the Nord Stream gas ...continue reading "The CIA warned Ukraine not to bomb the Nord Stream pipeline"

Sunset in the French town of Vernon, about 40 miles downstream on the Seine from Paris.

Here's something from news of the weird: Toyota’s latest engineering feat is an electric vehicle that behaves as if it has a stick shift, complete with revving sounds and faux gear shifts. ....The system generates fake sounds and simulated gear changes as well as genuine stalling if a rookie driver fumbles the controls, although the ...continue reading "Can stick shifts make a comeback?"

Bloomberg projects that peak oil usage is coming in six years: Back in the day, many of us predicted that peak oil would arrive by 2015 or so. But that was based on the ability to produce oil, and it turned out to be wrong thanks to the shale oil revolution. Bloomberg's forecast, by contrast, ...continue reading "Chart of the day: Peak oil is coming in 2029"

Weekly blue-collar earnings were up 4% in May compared to April. However, earnings have been flat for the past year, and after their big jump at the start of the pandemic have been dropping steadily ever since: Earnings for all workers fell 1% in May after adjusting for inflation.

The CPI inflation report for May was released this morning, and it's the same story as it's been for the past few months: headline inflation is down but core inflation is stubbornly steady: On a trend basis, headline inflation is almost down to zero, but core inflation is around 5%, the same as it's been ...continue reading "CPI down in May . . . sort of"

I've long been puzzled by something related to remote work. There's a big gap between two different metrics: Based on a variety of estimates, the number of office workers who actually work in the office (i.e., not remotely) has declined from 90% to about 70% today. But every estimate of office occupancy in big cities ...continue reading "Why is office occupancy down so much?"

A couple of days ago the Director of National Intelligence declassified a report written by an advisory group about the dangers of Commercially Available Information (CAI). This is information compiled by private companies and then sold to whoever pays for it—and it includes an astonishing array of data about individuals: CAI can be obtained from ...continue reading "Intelligence agencies can track your every move—and they can do it without a warrant"

Another triptych today. During the early part of my stay at City of Hope, while I was still mobile, I drove up to Mt. Wilson. I'd never been there before—when it was open, anyway—and it turned out to be a very serene place. It was a few acres of pine trees and telescopes but almost ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Over at New York today, Zak Cheney-Rice has a long piece about the imminent death of affirmative action if the Supreme Court, as expected, kills its final foothold in higher education later this year. It's a good piece, with loads of historical detail, and Cheney-Rice is certainly correct that the backlash against affirmative action in ...continue reading "Was affirmative action doomed from the start?"

The Wall Street Journal says that investors are feeling good about credit card debt: Missed-payment rates on these loans have ticked higher from ultralow levels hit during the pandemic, but they still sit well below the heights reached during past downturns. Over the past few months, the easing of bank stress has helped keep the ...continue reading "Raw data: Credit card spending since the pandemic"

I've seen a lot of stories like this lately: Tech companies that led the way in embracing remote work early in the pandemic are increasingly leading their workers right back to the office—whether they like it or not. Alphabet-owned Google, Lyft, Facebook parent Meta Platforms and Salesforce have all recently walked back remote-work policies they ...continue reading "Companies are finally getting fed up with remote work"

For 30 years Roy Emerson held tennis's record for men's Grand Slam titles at 12. His record seemed all but unbeatable until, finally, Pete Sampras broke it in 2000. But only barely: Sampras finished his career with 14 titles. Then, over the course of only 20 years, three players all broke Sampras's new record. By ...continue reading "Novak Djokovic is the best men’s tennis player of all time"

Conventional wisdom says that rising wages feed through into rising inflation. Thus, the only way to reduce inflation is to tighten monetary policy until wages start to decline. But a research letter from Adam Hale Shapiro of the San Francisco Fed casts some doubt on this: The estimates on both goods and housing services inflation ...continue reading "Rising wages have only a tiny impact on inflation"

At age 92, he's stepping down: George Soros, the legendary investor, philanthropist and right-wing target, is handing control of his $25 billion empire to a younger son—Alexander Soros, a self-described center-left thinker who grew up self-conscious of the family’s wealth and wasn’t thought to be a potential successor. The 37-year-old, who goes by Alex, said ...continue reading "They won’t have George Soros to kick around anymore"

What a bizarre story: Trump uses Democrat Matt Damon's voice in post-indictment video When I read this I thought it was yet another bit of AI fakery. But no. The Trumpies literally lifted a Matt Damon monologue from the movie Air and used it as narration for a campaign video. I guess they figure that ...continue reading "Trump steals Matt Damon’s voice for campaign video"

Earlier today Paul Krugman plugged the Stone Center, which recently created The GC Wealth Project, a cross-country database of wealth and wealth inequality. I decided to go play with it, but I didn't look much at inequality. I mostly looked at average wealth in half a dozen advanced economies: As recently as 2012, every country ...continue reading "Raw data: Wealth around the world"

According to the CDC, fewer than 4% of Americans are completely unprotected from COVID. The other 96% are either vaccinated or have been previously infected: These figures are taken from blood donors, who might be systematically different from the population as a whole. The study sample was weighted to account for this, but even so ...continue reading "Raw data: Herd immunity from COVID-19"