Kevin Drum 🕸

I accidentally came across this chart: For the last couple of years, consumer expectations of inflation a year away exactly matches whatever the inflation rate is right now. In other words, it's completely useless.

Retail sales fell once again, as they've done steadily for the past year: Sales were down 1.2% from February to March. That's an annualized rate of 14%. But the Fed still thinks the economy is running too hot.

Every year, Bud Light spends more than $100 million on marketing. Of that, maybe a few million goes to social media. Of that, a small fraction goes to deals with social media influencers. And of that, a few thousand dollars recently went to Dylan Mulvaney, a trans woman who racked up something like 10 million ...continue reading "What demographic groups should Bud Light be sure to avoid in the future?"

Back in 2004 the LA Times reported that Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas had been accepting lavish vacations for years from his billionaire "dear friend" Harlan Crow. These vacations seemingly stopped after that, but a few days ago we learned that, in fact, Thomas had merely stopped disclosing them. This was all "personal hospitality," which ...continue reading "Has Clarence Thomas broken the law?"

Yesterday a friend asked if I wanted to comment on National Review's editorial about the national abortion pill ban.¹ I didn't, really. NR is, obviously, institutionally anti-abortion, and I didn't have much interest in reading a bunch of pro-life boilerplate for the thousandth time in my life.² But eventually my curiosity got the best of ...continue reading "Mifepristone was not given special treatment by the FDA"

Spring has sprung, and that means our front garden is in its glory. Not only do we get something nice to look at, but the cats get an even better playground than usual. Charlie in particular loves to scamper around, chase birds and butterflies, and then hop up on one of the rocks like a ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

I haven't been following the leak of the Ukraine files super closely, but here's the latest news: Around a half-dozen F.B.I. agents on Thursday pushed onto the property of a 21-year-old member of the intelligence wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard who is linked to an online group at the center of a trove ...continue reading "How did the Ukraine document leaker do it?"

Yesterday was CPI day, which means today is PPI day. Here is the producer price index through March: Since last June, headline PPI has risen at an annualized rate of 0.7%. Core PPI has risen at an annualized rate of 2.6%. Both the headline and core PPI rates are considerably lower than the CPI rates. ...continue reading "Producer inflation is below zero now"

Welp, the Fed has changed its mind: Fed staff projected that the economy would enter a "mild recession" later this year....That's a shift from recent months, where staff just expected slower growth and "some softening" in the labor market — conditions that would allow the economy to dodge a recession. They've finally put the whole ...continue reading "Fed gives up on soft landing fantasy"

I was diddling around this afternoon and came across this: Business formation dipped at the very beginning of the pandemic but then spiked enormously in the summer of 2020. It went up and down a bit and then stabilized in 2021 at a noticeably higher rate than before the pandemic. I'm not sure what accounts ...continue reading "Raw data: New business formation before and after the pandemic"

Boaters out on the Grand Canal at the palace of Versailles.

Yesterday the judge in the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News, Eric Davis, learned something new: Fox Corp. had asserted since Dominion filed its lawsuit in 2021 that Rupert Murdoch had no official role at Fox News....But on Easter Sunday, Fox disclosed to Dominion’s attorneys that Murdoch also is “executive chair” at Fox News. Davis was ...continue reading "Judge rules that Fox News is a lying sack of shit*"

The Washington Post reports that consumers are still feeling battered by inflation: Although inflation has slowly cooled from last summer’s highs, price pressures continue to feel like an uphill battle for consumers, politicians and policymakers alike. Many say recent strides have been too spotty to offer much relief, even as annual price growth has slowed ...continue reading "Why does inflation still seem so high? It’s all about food."

I forgot to include supercore inflation in this morning's post. Here is CPI excluding food, energy, and shelter:

BLS released its March inflation numbers today, and they ticked down nicely from February: Core inflation is still stubbornly high, which BLS attributes largely to increases in the shelter index. This is fairly artificial, and should decrease substantially once their measure of shelter inflation catches up to the current day. (And in case you care, ...continue reading "Inflation ticks down in March"

Blue slips are back in the news after the Biden administration thought it had a consensus candidate for a judgeship in Mississippi, only for it to be blocked at the last minute by a Republican senator. Let's listen in: Republicans abandoned the blue-slip process for appeals court judges after gaining control of the Senate in ...continue reading "Republicans are playing games with blue slips yet again"

Two guys hanging out on La Brea Ave. in Los Angeles. Don't forget to file your taxes this week!

It's well documented that schoolchildren lost a significant amount of learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. A new NBER study attempts to figure out how much of that they made up in 2022. Their metric is the percentage of students who scored "proficient" on state tests. Here are the results for math: Of the 20 states ...continue reading "Which states recovered fastest from COVID learning losses?"

For some reason I decided to torture myself and read yesterday's New York Times focus group with twelve people in their 70s and 80s. Here's my favorite part: Earlier, someone mentioned Dianne Feinstein, the senator from California, who has served for nearly 30 years. She just announced she’d be retiring from the Senate. Does anyone ...continue reading "Always be sure to get mad at the right people"